On Jan 3, 2004, at 17:02, Raul Miller wrote:
On Sat, Jan 03, 2004 at 03:00:50PM -0500, Anthony DeRobertis wrote:I am not a DD (yet), and this is not a GR proposal (yet). However, I'm requesting comments on it, and maybe it'll be more tenable to people more reluctant to remove non-free.Thanks for posting this. I think it's probably the best statement of what this non-free proposal might be about that I've seen to date.PROPOSAL 1 -------- - Whereas, the Debian Project exists to create a distribution of free software; many Developers do not consider it moral or equitable to provide, freely, our project's resources to projects who are unwilling or unable to provide their code freely to the public;Two issues here: morality, and equitablity. [*] Morality: can you provide any reference to this moral code?
I refer to individual moral codes in that statement. The project, of course, does not have one.
One such moral code that is widely known (though not of a developer) is as
http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/philosophy.html
[*] Equitability: what is the unfairness, specifically
See above.
the importance of non-free software has greatly decreased since the founding of the project; andHow do you measure this?
I do not have a quantitative measurement of this. I do notice, from personal experience, that my reliance on non-free software has lessened. For example, first with more able versions of konqueror, then with Mozilla). For example, with PNG support in all major browsers, and now with the GIF patent expiring. With Ogg Vorbis over MP3, and there now even being several portable Vorbis players. With GCC's ever-improving PowerPC support. With MySQL and PostgreSQL being able to do what I used to have to use Oracle, etc. for.
outside groups have been quite able to provide well-integrated software no harder to obtain than that from Debian's own mirror network:I don't know what you're talking about here -- perhaps you should ennumerate these groups.
http://www.apt-get.org/