i is the time saved by not having to worry about non-free stuff. I expectthat's pretty small, but non-zero.n is the time taken trying to maintain software with poorer infrastructurethan Debian has. X is the time taken maintaining that infrastructureb is the extra time people devote to Debian because of our righteous stand;it's negative if time's lost. b = i - (n+X)
I'm not sure that b can be expressed so neatly. At the very least, you could also have D, the developer time currently not given to debian because of non-free but not spent on non-free, and against that there is d, the developer time currently given to debian by developers who quit over this. They may both be sizeable, for all we know just now.
You also seem to dismiss the possibility that external infrastructures could outperform Debian in the limit, which would make n negative eventually. There are probably other variables we missed.
I might be wrong, of course, but that no one seems to be willing to setupa working non-free archive just for the hell of it seems to indicate X isn't trivially small.
It looks like some things need clarifying (eg Origin/Bugs) to make that effort much more than a folly if this vote doesn't succeed. I can't blame people for not wanting to build follies.
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