On Fri, Sep 21, 2001 at 05:00:48PM -0300, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote: > On Fri, 21 Sep 2001, Richard B. Kreckel wrote: > > The social contract says "Our Priorities are Our Users and Free Software". > > Such a win-port might indeed serve some users. But for my own part, I do > > have some personal problems with making all free software win-compatible. > > Does it serve Free Software? Such ports frequently lead to crippled > > design [1] and frankly, I do not like to give people more excuses for not > > switching to an entirely free OS. > > Well, we cannot have Debian that runs over the Microsoft Windows(TM) kernel, > since the Windows kernel is an extremely non-free component, and nothing on > Debian can have a dependency on non-free *software*. Therefore there will > never be a Debian for arch "Windows" (or whatever it gets called).
This view may be a little narrow. Many of the current debian architectures depend on non-free software in the bootstrapping process (e.g. BIOSes). And don't forget that before linux, free software was developed on non-free OSes most of the time... Jules