Re: GR: Removal of non-free

[Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>]

On Thu, Dec 25, 2003 at 06:40:47PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 24, 2003 at 08:43:11PM +0000, Andrew Suffield wrote:
> > I propose the following resolution:
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > The next release of Debian will not be accompanied by a non-free
> > section; there will be no more stable releases of the non-free
> > section. Uploads to the non-free section of the archive will be
> > disabled as soon as is feasible. The Debian project will cease active
> > support of the non-free section.
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> This resolution violates the social contract, so cannot be passed. I
> therefore call on the secretary to reject it on procedural grounds.
> 
> HTH, HAND. :)
> 
> > Some constraints have been applied here on when these things will
> > happen, but most has been left deliberately vague. The fate of the
> > files currently in unstable/non-free is deliberately unspecified.
> 
> How about the people proposing this have a talk to the people affected
> by it -- ftpmaster, the release management team, etc -- and try to work

And the maintainers of packages in non-free ?

I agree that there are many things in non-free that we may be better of
with, but there are other stuff in there that is valuable to software in
main (documentation comes to mind, but then many documentation packages
in main should really be in non-free).

Also, packages in non-free is a good candidate for future freeing of it
by the upstream authors. I have seen this process happen with the ocaml
package, which was long in non-free, and has since been freed, in some
small part because of the discussions i, as debian maintainer, had with
the upstream team.

Friendly,

Sven Luther