Re: one of the many reasons why removing non-free is a dumb idea
On Wed, Jan 07, 2004 at 08:44:19AM -0600, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> > As time passes, it appears to me more and more that the continued
> > presence of non-free is incompatible with the long-term interests of
> > our stated goals, users and free software.
>
> I beg to differ. Indeed, the very reason for having non-free
> is because the software performs a function that is useful to users,
> despite no meeting our guidelines.
Ah, but that is a short-term interest. I specifically singled out
long-term interests in my statement.
> And it helps free software two fold: it a helps in
> transitioning packages to free-er licenses (ncftp, qt, etc), and it
> gets us a wider audience (people who would have not chosen Debian
> without the support for the non-free stuff). Once in the fold, they
> are exposed to the ideas of free software, they espouse, and
> proselytize, Debian.
I still have yet to see anyone demonstrate that this is all impossible,
or even significantly more difficult, by putting on-free on a different
FTP server.
> Everyone knows that Debian can't package all software there is
> out there, so absence of the software reflects on the incompleteness
> of Debian to the casual end user; having the software labelled as
> non-free reflects on the software package.
This, of course, assumes that the casual end user has non-free in
sources.list; regularly checks what section of the archive things come
from on install time; and knows what non-free means. I think these are
all shaky assumptions to make about the casual end-user, especially
since apt-get does not say what section a package is in.
> > We are now long past the era where technical hurdles prevented
> > spinning non-free off of Debian. We have a set of people that are
> > capable of maintaining it by itself. We also have a situation where
>
> Got anything to back this up? Who are these people? Do they
> have the resources you say they are capable of marshalling?
Of the people arguing against removing non-free, I know that many of
them are skilled enough to maintain a Debian archive. While I don't
know of specific hosting arrangements, I also know that many less
knowledgable people than they are able to find ample hosting, and I
suspect that this would not be a big difficulty given the level of
support they suggest non-free enjoys.
-- John
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