On Mon, Jan 26, 2004 at 10:10:43PM +0100, Sven Luther wrote: > On Mon, Jan 26, 2004 at 12:08:43PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote: > > On Fri, Jan 23, 2004 at 06:11:38PM +0100, Sven Luther wrote: > > > On Thu, Jan 22, 2004 at 12:39:56PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote: > > > > and all GNU documentation shall use the GNU FDL henceforth." Equally, > > > > it doesn't serve us to say "You'll take our non-free section away when > > > > you pry our cold, dead hands from it." > > > > > > Nope, only when a free alternative for all of its content has been > > > written. > > > > All of its content right now? Is there some freeze on adding new > > packages to non-free I hadn't heard about? If so, that's odd, because > > an ITP of a non-free package has been made on debian-devel within the > > past few days. > > Sure, but hopefully there will be no more non-free software in some > point of the future :)) Is that more or less likely to happen in the absence of a disincentive to produce it? *Would* dropping non-free serve as a disincentive to produce non-free software? Before making up one's mind, it might be worth considering the opinions of Ken Lunde of Adobe Systems Inc., when a (very polite) relicensing request was made of that company[1]. It would appear that at least in some cases, the retention of the non-free section serves as an incentive to preserve the non-free licensing of a work. It is scenarios like this that make me question the prediction that all non-free software will just wither away if only we leave it alone. Where "leaving it alone" means continuing to endorse it by providing it on our mirror network, that is. > But you have a point here. [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/debian-legal-200401/msg00235.html -- G. Branden Robinson | The software said it required Debian GNU/Linux | Windows 3.1 or better, so I branden@debian.org | installed Linux. http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
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