On Tue, Mar 06, 2007, Kari Pahula wrote: > I would like to hear what the candidates think about the non-free > section. Is having it hosted on Debian's infrastructure still worth > it? It was never "worth" it. It has brought disagreement with the FSF (nothing new, I know) which as a result did not really help us weigh in the GFDL discussions. And it's not like not providing non-free would suddenly make the software disappear. Of course some of our users want non-free and rely on it, but our users also want world peace and free porn and we're not likely to provide that (because we're about free software, you know; so non-free software is acceptable but free porn isn't). Anthony suggests that we should have more well-known software in non-free; I utterly disagree. I wonder how his suggestion of having vmplayer would help either our users or free software, since we have kvm and qemu which are far more featured. The only thing that we may have more of in non-free is software that does not have free equivalents. The rest we should have less. By far the most used non-free software we distribute is compression software (lha, rar, unrar), Java (soon to go) and 3D drivers (ATI and NVidia) but GFDL documentation is likely to take the top of the charts soon, so until the FSF changes its mind or new documentation is written, it's become even harder to get rid of non-free, even though providing a URL to a tarball of the non-free documentation should be more than enough. > Do you expect that there would be any changes regarding its status > during your term? I'll be happy the day non-free is gone. However I understand how controversial the issue is and I do not plan to initiate any move towards the removal of non-free as DPL. It would be nice though to reconsider what can go into non-free. The times when we needed Netscape Navigator or Acrobat Reader are now far behind. I believe it should be cleaned up, with rules such as these: - non-free programs should come with source - non-free programs should be autobuilt - non-free software should be modifiable by Debian for integration - non-free software should be modifiable by Debian for security fixes Most of the time, if there is a security issue in our users' non-free software, we leave them behind, not because we don't wish to do anything but because we cannot do anything. And this is not acceptable. > Do you think that there are going to be > votes like http://www.debian.org/vote/2004/vote_002 again? I think it is inevitable that there will be votes like this until non-free disappears or is deeply rethought. > Option 1---->: Choice 1: Cease active support of non-free [3:1 majority needed] > / Option 2--->: Choice 2: Re-affirm support for non-free > |/ Option 3-->: Choice 3: Further Discussion > ||/ > V: 132 sho Samuel Hocevar > > Gustavo Franco wasn't a DD during this vote and Aigars Mahinov didn't > vote. The rest of you: would you still vote like you did in 2004, if > the issue was brought up again? Yes. Regards, -- Sam.
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