Re: non-free and users?
"Sergey V. Spiridonov" <sena@hurd.homeunix.org> writes:
> Remi Vanicat wrote:
>> "Sergey V. Spiridonov" <sena@hurd.homeunix.org> writes:
>> In this case, I clearly disagree with you. By stopping to distribute
>> non-free we will decrease the amount of good, and so act non-ethical.
>
> Where is this good, which we will decrease? Do you think that dropping
> non-free will broke the upstream copy, or it will destroy the copy of
> those who downloded it? Where is the harm?
It will make it harder for beginner to find it. nowadays, if you want
to have the ocaml reference manual integrated into your dwww
documentations, you only have to do an apt-get install ocaml-doc, with a
source.list containing only official debian mirror. You don't have to
do it yourself (because upstream don't integrate their documentation to
dwww, as they don't know dwww), You don't have to look for some
unofficial debian repository.
All this will became more difficult if non-free is removed from
debian. There will be less mirror (may be even no mirror for the
debian package). If the non-free project is not done, then you will
have to trust an unofficial repository, and when you are a newbie you
don't know that this doesn't anything (well, if it is my repository).
The bug report system might be less valuable, if I orphaned the
package, it might more difficult for people to know it. And I'm sure
that I can find a lot of others example of how thing will be less
integrated to the debian system, and so less easy to use for our user,
that are one of our top priorities. By the way, i can link the
ocaml-doc package to the other priorities we have (free software), as
it is the documentation of a free software. We loose. It will be the
only thing that removing non-free will do to our user : losing the
nowadays integration of non-free stuff to debian.
--
Rémi Vanicat
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