Re: First Call for votes: General resolution for the handling of the non-free section
On Fri, Mar 26, 2004 at 07:01:41PM +0100, Dale C. Scheetz wrote:
> There is no contradiction between declaring Debian to be totally about
> Free Software, and the maintaining of a section called non-free. The
> non-free packages are examples of software that fails to meet our
> definition of free, which the rest of the world considers "free enough".
Uhm, 'the rest of the world' considers binary-only drivers 'free
enough'?
> The fact that we can "legally" distribute this code makes that
> distribution completely "OK" by the rest of the software community not
> committed to software freedom as Debian defines it.
I don't think RedHat or SuSE ship any significant package from non-free
in their default distribution, apart from the binary-only drivers of
course.
> We provide examples of the right way to build Debian packages in many
> different places, although I find the existing code base to be full of
> both good and bad examples, our documentation is mostly self consistant.
What does this have to do with the non-free debate?
> Negative examples tend to improve our understanding faster than positive
> ones. Being able to point to packages with "poor" licensing conditions
> has always been helpful when trying to determine what is wrong with some
> other license.
Why would pointing to packages at non-free.org be worse in this regard?
I'd say it would be even better, as they are clearly marked as having a
poor license.
> I don't have much time to devote to Debian these days, but that doesn't
> mean that I don't still find it very important.
Yeah, tuning into this discussion is the best you can do with your
little time in order to help Debian!
> The Contract and Guidelines were written specifically to block political
> modification of the goals and principles of Debian. If Debian is to
> survive, this attempt to modify our principles must fail.
When the Guidelines were written, you needed non-free software to
actually upload a package into the archive, to the best of my knowledge.
Non-free software was not a commodity back then, it was very hard to get
any work done without it I guess.
These times have changed. Today, the 'almost-free' packages in non-free
are mostly insignificant for most users. In contrast, by far the most
important ones are the binary-only drivers nowadays.
non-free has changed. I don't see why Debian should not reevaluate its
support.
Well, we did, and we agreed to support non-free for the time being, so I
don't understand why you're making such a fuss about it.
Michael
--
Michael Banck
Debian Developer
mbanck@debian.org
http://www.advogato.org/person/mbanck/diary.html
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