Re: non-free and users?
Raul Miller wrote:
> [*] preventing the distribution of program 'A' to people who need it
> also contradicts human ethics (unless something at least as adequate
> for that need is distributed instead).
That is true, and that is why I propose to drop non-free. Debian will
not have non-free to distribute, so he will not prevent its distribution.
> I do think it's important to let people know to have lower
> expectations for non-free software than for software in main.
> I think we need to do this better than what we're doing now.
Dropping non-free will let them know this best of all.
> I don't see a basis here for preventing distribution of all of
> non-free by Debian.
I do agree that there's an ethical problem here, but I think a blanket
prohibition on non-free makes that problem a worse problem.
I believe stopping to distribute non-free is an ethical action. This is
not prohibition: those who really want to have non-free can find it
somewhere else. Stopping to act non-ethical is ethical. You seem expect
from users, who know much less about programs and licensing to act
better than Debian developers. This will never happen. It is
responsibility of Debian developers to act ethical, because they should
be good example for users.
To use your medical analogy, this is something like triage (sorting
patients in emergency medicine). If we sort packages based on likely
benefit, we should exclude from non-free software which has not enough
benefit or negative benefit. But there should still be a place in
non-free for software which has positive benefit, even if that benefit
is not the highest benefit.
I believe DFSG is the best tool for sorting programs. Those programs
which do not fit DFSG are called non-free and have negative impact on
Debian itself.
--
Best regards, Sergey Spiridonov
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