Re: The "Free" vs. "Non-Free" issue
On 2004-01-05 17:48:50 +0000 Oliver Elphick <olly@lfix.co.uk> wrote:
We have a commitment
to maintain it as long as it is needed (social contract) and we should
abide by that commitment; not chop and change for ideological reasons.
What is the temporal scope of our social contract? Current and past
releases? That and the release under development? Forever? If forever,
did the project's aims and methods get fixed in stone when it was
issued? Why is there a way to change it in the constitution?
[...] I don't think that would be any better morally than a
commercial firm's decision to abandon support for a product which was
not sufficiently profitable.
Would anyone argue that orphaning or deleting individual packages was
immoral? That happens already.
In the end, reliability and loyalty to our
users are a lot more important than ideological purity.
The "reliability and loyalty" case for non-free is dubious, as we
can't properly test, verify or repair some of it.
The reason for providing non-free is just the same as it ever was: for
the convenience of users who want to use Debian and also need to use
packages that do not meet DFSG requirements.
I think this could probably be done better by improvements in support
for packages not in the Debian archive, like the Origin and Bugs
fields.
Any user who doesn't like
non-free can simply exclude it from his sources.list.
Are developers who will not agree to use non-free blocked from jobs
where they ought to deal with it? Are there such jobs?
The time to get rid of non-free is when it no longer has any
maintained
packages; not until then.
Will that ever happen? Will non-free packagers work towards this?
Does this mean that you would support this proposal if Mr Suffield
goes on a killing spree of DDs who package for non-free? ;-)
--
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