Re: summary of software licenses in non-free
On Tue, Jan 20, 2004 at 08:45:32AM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 19, 2004 at 05:56:12PM +0100, Michael Banck wrote:
> > On Mon, Jan 19, 2004 at 11:34:59AM -0500, Raul Miller wrote:
> > > On Mon, Jan 19, 2004 at 04:21:28PM +0100, Michael Banck wrote:
> > > > (and heck, you probably could have setup the APT repository for
> > > > non-free during the time you wast^Wspent in this discussion).
> > > I think the right place to start would be a statement of intent.
> > I guess it's pretty clear what needs to be done in case Andrew's
> > proposal passes, no? We've got the nonfree.org domain and we've got ten
> > years of experience with hosting Debian packages.
>
> What's this "we" ? Please speak for yourself,
Fair enough, sorry.
> > > The harder part is organizing resources and getting something useful done.
> > Hardware/network resources might indeed be a problem. I don't think we
> > can assume that any hardware donors had foo.nonfree.org in mind when
> > they offered their machines/connectivity. Does anybody have an idea on
> > this?
>
> Sure, keep reusing Debian's resources.
One idea was to modify katie just so slightly that she installs non-free
packages into /org/foo.org instead of /org/ftp.debian.org. That probably
would't go far enough for people in favor of dropping non-free I
suppose.
> Personally, I'm finding it pretty hard to work out what I'd want to
> work on should this GR pass -- can I put up with crappy, contrib-style,
> third party non-free stuff well enough that I can avoid having to do
> a whole lot of boring make work to reimplement various bits of Debian
> infrastructure?
I don't think you need to reimplement Debian infrastructure in order to
duplicate it, just to adjust it. Of course, you're more expert than me
to comment on this.
> Would maintaining nonfree.org actually be significantly simpler than
> just forking Debian entirely? Probably, but how much?
What do you mean by 'forking Debian' anyway? I wouldn't consider
outsourcing less than 200 packages (forgot the exact number) a 'fork'.
The requirements for infrastructure and maintenance are considerably
lower than for a full-blown fork of Debian, IMHO.
> There's lots of technical reasons to create entirely new
> distributions, so maybe that'd be less unpleasant, in spite of the
> extra difficulties. I dunno.
>
> I certainly don't feel obligated to make any of those choices should
> this GR pass. I'm not sure why you'd imagine any particular one of them
> will either need to be done should the GR pass, nor why you'd imagine
> any of them necessarily will be done.
I don't imagine any of those options to actually happen, I'm just trying
to figure out a transition plan in case the GR passes. IIRC, the biggest
(factual) argument against Andrew's argument was exactly this: 'There's
no transition plan. What will our users do?'.
But I see that we're running in circles. The 'don't drop non-free'
people just say 'd'oh, don't drop it and you don't need a plan', while
the 'drop non-free' people don't care about it anyway.
Michael
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