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Re: non-free?



On 25/03/14 at 10:25 +0000, Steve McIntyre wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 09:32:26AM +0100, Frank Lin PIAT wrote:
> >On Tue, 2014-03-25 at 15:29 +0900, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> >> Because as long as we document it, it's very hard to claim that
> >> "non-free" is not part of Debian, when you could just add it as a
> >> keyword side-by-side with "main" in your sources.list.
> >
> >The firmware have been moved from main to non-free a few years ago. The
> >unintended consequences is that almost every system now use the non-free
> >suite.
> >Therefore users are more likely to install non-free packages.
> 
> Yup. Various conversations have happened around firmware in the last
> few years, but this is an effect that some people may not be aware
> of. So...
> 
> Neil and Lucas: what do you have to say on this front? Of all the
> things that *could* be done here, what would you like to see
> personally?

I think that most of the ideas about increasing awareness about non-free
software are good ideas, and I'd like to see the ones for which we can find
volunteers implemented ;)

Something else that would be nice to have is a way to track the story
behind each piece of non-free software. There are some cases where
software ends up in non-free for rather obscure (but correct!) reasons.
It would be great to have a place to document those reasons, the
freedoms that are given up when using that piece of software, the state
of alternatives, pointers to relevant bugs or contact points that one
cloud lobby, etc.

It would be quite easy to do that by starting from the popcon ranking of
non-free packages[1]. Maybe something for a wiki.non-free.org?

Lucas


[1] UDD query: select package, insts from popcon
where package in (select package from packages where release='sid' and component in ('non-free', 'contrib'))
order by insts desc limit 30;

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