Re: GR: Removal of non-free
On Fri, Jan 02, 2004 at 04:31:29PM -0500, Raul Miller wrote:
> > The best way to get rid of non-free would involve writing free
> > replacements for all software in non-free. But that's a lot of work,
> > and I am not going to insist on that people write any software.
> >
> > On the other hand, the recent proposals for getting rid of non-free
> > appear to me as "solutions looking for a problem" rather than anything
> > I'd want to see implemented.
On Thu, Jan 08, 2004 at 03:01:06PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote:
> Removing non-free would:
>
> 1) narrow the focus of our labor
> a) either by explicitly reducing the amount of work that is done to
> maintain the non-free section; or
The potential gains here are negligible.
It's kinda like eating a seven thousand calorie meal, then skipping
the after dinner mint because you're on a diet.
> b) explicitly acknowledging what is tacitly understood, that the
> non-free section is already a second-class citizen that enjoys
> little in the way of QA
I don't see any potential gains here at all. Enlighten me?
> 2) improve our détente with other members of the Free Software
> community, particularly the Free Software Foundation; and
I don't know what "improve our détente" means. Enlighten me?
[Does that mean that we can be "holier than thou" because we're not
distributing their docs? Or does that mean that we're now immune to
criticism because we've dropped some packages? Clearly, I'm missing
the point.]
> 3) make us more coherent exemplars of a 100% Free operating system
I think the boot disks are a much more significant issue.
At the moment, it's "Oh, yeah, debian -- dselect should be taken out
and shot." [I'm relaying a sentiment I've had expressed to me from more
than one person.]
With your change, that could become "Oh, yeah, debian -- dselect should
be taken out and shot. But I hear they're really strict about what
software they accept."
Or consider something like "My ethernet card didn't work. It turns out
that Debian gave me a 2.2 kernel."
To my knowledge, none of the programs in non-free would be installed
by default during a "task-*" install. People have to go out of their
way to find those programs even if they've just included non-free in
sources.list. That's what matters to most people.
Plus, when we do drop non-free, we can get a fair bit of publicity about
it, for all that it's a fairly minor number of packages. It would be
really nice if that were publicity which showed us in a good light.
> (Whether people are likely to agree with 1a or 1b depends on how well
> they think the non-free section is maintained and kept up at present.)
>
> I acknowledge that some people don't feel any of the above goals are
> worth pursuing -- but that doesn't mean that everyone does.
How about people who think those goals are worth pursuing, but that the
current effort makes things worse more than it makes things better.
--
Raul
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