> Presumably you should list "Perceived philosophical costs in not
> supporting as a project all the software we legally can" in the next
> section.
Legal != ethical, so I'm not sure I'd add that. I'm not personally saying
anything about the ethics of non-free, btw.
> Uh. How about not being quite so dismissive, and saying "alienation of users
> who (a) can no longer find debs for non-free software they use, (b) have to
> manage tens of independent apt sources of varying quality instead of one"?
> The problem isn't editing the file.
I'm assuming that someone will take the current non-free and put it all on
nonfree.org if we stop distributing it. Perhaps that's overly simplistic.
> > - WTF to do with contrib?
>
> That's not a cost, it's an issue that needs to be decided, but hasn't.
Until it's decided, the costs associated with the answer can't be known.
> > Feel free to add to either list. I almost put "loss of functionality such
> > as support for certain hardware, japanese pdf readers" but technically
> > Debian does not contain those now.
>
> No, the "Debian GNU/Linux Distribution" does not contain them now --
> that's what main is.
(That's what I said, perhaps not clearly.)
> Perhaps. I think you're underestimating the problems though -- most
> external apt sources don't bother with most of our infrastructure; they
> don't bother validating uploads (since only one person can upload), they
> don't have good mirroring or mailing lists, they tend not to have BTSes,
> they tend not to have any special security support, they tend not to have
> a process for letting independent people add software to their archive
> (ie, new-maintainers). Mostly this isn't a problem, because the software
> they're maintaining is intended to get into the Debian archive sooner or
> later, and doesn't really need it's own long term support structure.
You're right on many counts; but backports.org, for instance, requires a
valid Debian key for upload, does have extensive mirrors, has a process for
accepting new maintainers, etc. Perhaps nonfree.org uses exactly the same
logistical policies as Debian, has the same keyring, even runs on the same
servers for the first few months of life. What's the point you ask? The
point is that once the split is made, then it becomes more easy down the
road to separate the two.
> The question, though, is whether whatever _actually happens_ will be as
> good as what Debian currently offers our users -- a single site, with
> lots of infrastructure is a lot more useful than a hundred poorly
> supported sites to try to find then look through.
I don't have a crystal ball so I can't answer that.
> And the question is also whether whatever actually happens will cost as
> little time and effort as our support of non-free currently does. If it
> in fact takes more time or resources or effort than reusing Debian's
> existing infrastructure, then it's highly likely that that time and
> resources will come at a cost to free software; ie, that it's time and
> resources that would otherwise have been spent doing stuff that would be
> useful for free software.
I understand your point. But it's obvious to me that making a change will
require effort above and beyond making it. If the initial change is most
of the cost, perhaps it's worth it.
What if today we put in a CNAME for nonfree.org to debian.org and then
configured apache to not show non-free directories for people coming in on
debian.org http requests? (Ignore ftp and rsync for the moment for the
sake of discussion.) Would doing just _that much_ be too much of an
inconvience to the users? If it is, then what would it take to make that
much of a change palatable?
> Both those are important questions: there's little we care *more* about
> than how our users are affected, and maximising the resources available
> to the free software community of which we're a part.
Agreed. I came into this discussion thinking the removal of non-free was
"obviously" a good idea. I'm still not sure what the right answer is
(there is a lot of rhetoric and intellectual masturbation clouding the real
discussion). Overall, I guess that like always it's going to be an "action
is louder than words" situation, and until someone cares enough to create a
parallel nonfree.org and work out all of the details, the status quo will
remain. The irony is that it's probably going to have to be someone who is
very pro-removal of nonfree who does it.
Take care,
Dale
--
Dale E. Martin, Clifton Labs, Inc.
Senior Computer Engineer
dmartin@cliftonlabs.com
http://www.cliftonlabs.com
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