On Wed, Jun 07, 2000 at 09:06:41PM -0400, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote: > Chris Lawrence <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > 1. It will have minimal effects since people will still be able to use > > non-free software. > > > > 2. It will have far-reaching effects since Debian (the corporate > > entity) will expend fewer resources in support of people wanting to > > use non-free software. > > I'm somenoe who has made these points, or something like them, but I > think they are both mispresented in order to make them look > contradictory. > > The correct version of 1 is: > > 1) It cause minimal disruption of users since people will still find > it as easy to use non-free software if they want.
And how/where will they find it? Not as easy as adding "non-free" to the end of their apt/sources.list lines. > The correct version of 2 is: > > 2) It will have important effects on Debian, because we will maintain > our actual focus, devoting our resources to Debian. ??? What do you mean? What are "our resources" and how is this proposal going to change matters? The developers maintaining non-free are hardly likely to stop just because their packages are now going to live elsewhere. Don't tell me that the <1GB of non-free is the issue, 'cos that's all donated anyway, and I do not believe that the marginal costs of administering non-free are significant. > non-free is not part of Debian, so why are we distributing it? For > the convenience of the users. If it were not for that, we would never > consider it. Since we can meet the convenience of the users in a way > which does not require weakening the principles upon which Debian was > founded. we should do it. And how, exactly, would that work? Do you have any idea how many complaints I heard when Debian only changed its internal archive structure a couple of releases ago? How many lusers couldn't figure it out? Get real! Julian -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, QMW, Univ. of London. [EMAIL PROTECTED] Debian GNU/Linux Developer, see http://www.debian.org/~jdg Donate free food to the world's hungry: see http://www.thehungersite.com/