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Re: Another Non-Free Proposal



On Sat, Jan 10, 2004 at 10:10:34AM +0100, Michael Banck wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 09, 2004 at 09:41:55PM -0500, Raul Miller wrote:
> > Logic is great, but its results are meaningless unless you start from
> > a meaningful position.
> It was at the very least a valuable testimony on how Debian is regarded
> by its users and/or the outside world. Perhaps a DebianPlanet vote could
> give more valuable input, but I cannot come up with a nice set of
> questions which are not suggestive. Anybody?

I don't think it makes sense to ask users if we should drop non-free,
per se -- how would interpret 20% saying "no", and 80% saying "yes"? As
"vast majority want non-free gone - let's drop it", or "non-free takes 2%
of our effort, and is valuable to 20% of our users? - definitely keep it!"

Some more detailed polling might be interesting, though. I'd be interested
in knowing the answers to questions like:

(a) Do you use non-free/proprietary software on a Debian system?
(b) Do you use packages from the non-free component in Debian?
(c) If you answered yes to (b), would any of the following cause you
    to seriously consider switching to a different distribution:
        (1) debs currently in non-free were maintained at roughly the same 
	    level by a different group, and dropped by Debian itself?
        (2) debs currently in non-free were only available from a variety of
            third party sites (but accessible by apt), not necessarily with
	    any relationship to the Debian project at all, and not necessarily
	    reimplementing all the features Debian has (bug tracking, mirrors,
	    etc)?
        (3) if bugs in free software that Debian distributes that only affect
            non-free software are given a lower priority, or are not fixed at
	    all?
        (4) if no non-free debs were available, but a majority of non-free
	    software for Linux was available in the form of LSB packages, and
	    work correctly on Debian when installed with alien?
        (5) if the only way to install non-free software on Debian is by
	    using alien on packages for other distributions and hoping, or
	    building the package yourself?

Cheers,
aj

-- 
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.

               Linux.conf.au 2004 -- Because we can.
           http://conf.linux.org.au/ -- Jan 12-17, 2004



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