On Tue, Mar 02, 2004 at 05:12:44PM +0000, Martin Michlmayr wrote: > > 3. Do you think Debian should continue to support non-free? > > No. Debian is about creating a operating system with free software, > and I don't think we should be in the business of distributing > non-free software. I think we should focus on what we do best (create > and integrate free software), and this would also get us closer to > other players in the community, such as the FSF. > > Having said this, I don't think the current non-free removal vote is > being done correctly. If we decide to remove non-free, we have to > provide a good upgrade plan for our users. Thus, I think we should > *first* move non-free to something like non-free.org, encourage people > to use new APT sources list while at the same time supporting the old > APT lines (i.e. still keeping it on Debian mirrors) for a while. I knew *somebody* was going to bite this one. It has proven to be difficult to impossible to get people to do any real work towards doing things in this "obvious" way. Taken as a given that everybody either wants to keep non-free or to remove it (near enough to accurate), I'll introduce this tautology: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The work to provide an upgrade plan for non-free users must be performed by either or both of these groups: (a) Those who wish to see non-free removed (b) Those who wish to see non-free kept ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Group (a) does not want to do this work because they want to have nothing to do with non-free. Group (b) does not want to do this work because they want non-free to be in Debian, not external to it. (Again, imperfect characterisation, but close enough) We find (found) ourselves at an impasse, where no actual work can get done. The work of maintaining non-free outside of Debian *needs* to be done by those who want to keep non-free in Debian. But they aren't going to do it while non-free is in Debian. My solution was a simple one. We decide to remove non-free, then anybody who cares enough to keep it can arrange for it to be supported outside of Debian, and then we remove it. The GR proposal was written with this goal in mind. Note the absence of time constraints; these are deliberate. It means precisely what it says, and it conspicuously does not say "non-free shall immediately be removed from the Debian archive". It was *very* carefully worded over a period of about two weeks. Once the people who want to maintain non-free have a reason to see it done outside of Debian, I would be surprised if it took longer than a week for servers to be procured and the basic mail/accounts/keyring/BTS/archive stuff to be set up. Most of it (everything but the archive) can be done in under a day, given the hardware. That's assuming anybody really cares enough to do it - it's possible that nobody does, and non-free will die (not implausible, looking at the list of things still in non-free). In this scenario, it deserves to die. I do not believe it is realistic to expect any of this to happen without a decision to remove non-free taking place. I do not believe there is any way that people who would rather scrap non-free to see that happen (even in the way you describe) other than voting for this proposal, or waiting for all the packages in non-free to be removed via attrition as they become unmaintained. I find nothing in the proposal that conflicts with your desired sequence of events. And I've said all this before. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- |
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