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Re: GR: Removal of non-free



On Fri, Jan 02, 2004 at 08:09:09PM +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
> On 2004-01-02 10:33:23 +0000 Emmanuel Charpentier 
> <charpent@bacbuc.dyndns.org> wrote:
> >Because I somehow doubt that the current technical and social 
> >infrastructures 
> >behind Debian "non-free" can be currently duplicated "somewhere else".
> Debian did it. 

Almost all the support for non-free in Debian is a free result of
our support for free software. The n-m process, the BTS, the PTS, the
mailing lists, policy, our security infrastructure, our buildds, our
mirror network, release management, buildds all have to exist whether we
support non-free or not, and none of them would be significantly simpler
or even different if we didn't support non-free. The archive might be
a little simpler if we drop both non-free and contrib; if we don't drop
contrib as well, it's no simpler.

Which is to say, Debian did all it's done in order to support free
software. Whatever effort's spent on this new non-free network, most of
it is going to be of no benefit to those of us who don't use non-free
software.

Basically, the issue is why spend 100 man hours on maintaining Debian,
then another 90 man hours on maintaining a separate non-free repository,
when you can spend 101 man hours maintaining Debian and it's existing
support for non-free?

Cheers,
aj

-- 
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.

               Linux.conf.au 2004 -- Because we can.
           http://conf.linux.org.au/ -- Jan 12-17, 2004

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