Re: Understanding the GFDL GR proposal and amendment
My take on that part:
On Fri, Jan 20, 2006 at 11:20:32AM +0200, Fabian Fagerholm wrote:
> The GR proposal apparently results in useful GFDL-covered material to be
> moved to the non-free section. In a previous GR, Debian has reaffirmed
> support for non-free. Is it a conscious motive or an accidental
> side-effect of this GR proposal to work towards supporting a Debian
> system where users can decide for themselves what "level of freeness"
> they wish to have, complete DFSG-freeness being the strictest possible
> choice? Will the next step be to alter the Social Contract to no longer
> say that contrib and non-free are not part of the Debian system (?5)?
When we voted to 'reaffirm non-free' the usage of non-free was
comparativly higher (netscape and acroread were popular, neither of them
are in sarge). In the last years, a number of non-free packages has been
relicensed to a DFGS-free license, and a number of others have been
relicensed in a way that make them non-redistributable by Debian. The
popularity-contest usage for non-free
<http://popcon.debian.org/non-free/by_vote.gz> show that there not much
interest in nonfree. A large part of nonfree are previously assumed
DFSG-free software that were discovered non-free. Moving GFDL-covered
packages there only continue this trend.
A popular misconception is that nonfree is mainly for proprietary
binary-only apps (netscape, acroread, SUN JDK, Macromedia flash, etc.).
None of them are in non-free today.
Moving the GFDL-covered packages to non-free might increase non-free
usage, but I don't see how having non-free softwares in main can be
any better.
Cheers,
--
Bill. <ballombe@debian.org>
Imagine a large red swirl here.
Reply to: