Re: My platform
Scripsit Angus Lees <gus@debian.org>
> To give a concrete example: My laptop has an extremely comon centrino
> (ipw2200) wireless card. To support this card under Debian/Linux, I
> need to install packages from contrib and download a firmware blob by
> hand. To simply have the HTML4 specification easily available, I need
> to install packages from non-free. What I'm trying to say is that by
> removing all these things from main (imo) too quickly and too early,
> we have instead *encouraged* all our users to use non-free.
It is not, as far as I am aware, a goal of the project to discourage
users from using the "non-free" archive. Perhaps RMS would like it to
be one of our goals, but I suppose what he would really like is to
discourage people from using not-free *software* no matter which
archive it is found in. Putting things that are actually not free into
main simply to keep people from adding the dirty words non-free to
their sources.list will not change the fact that they *are* using the
not-free things. It won't make RMS happier, it shouldn't make us
happier, and there is no reason whatsoever why it should make our
users happier.
What *is* our goal is to allow our users to *know* which non-free
software they are using. That goal merely requires us to label the
things we distribute as accurately as we can. If something is found to
be not free, it should be put in the non-free archive. No users will
be hurt by downloading it from there, compared to downloading it from
the main archive, it having been fradulently placed there by us.
> I'm concerned that the long-term goal is going to suffer by forcing
> users to make the choice between (a) going somewhere else or (b)
> exposing themselves to poorly supported software from non-free.
"Exposing themselves???" Why do you think the software is
intrinsically poorer simply because it is in non-free rather than in
main? The maintainer is the same, the organisation is the same, the
BTS is the same. The only thing that differs is the label, and the
label is worthless anyway if we do not strive to make it truthful.
--
Henning Makholm "No one seems to know what
distinguishes a bell from a whistle."
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