> > Why do you find that solution so unacceptable that you think Debian *must* > > do something else?
On Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 09:17:17PM -0600, John Goerzen wrote: > As time passes, it appears to me more and more that the continued > presence of non-free is incompatible with the long-term interests of our > stated goals, users and free software. Please be more specific. > Providing a distribution platform for non-free software seems to greatly > moderate the incentive the non-free authors would have to relicense > their software under the GPL; it seems that the areas that we have been > successful already are testament to what we have the potential to do > were we to carry an even larger carrot and stick. Please provide examples. > We are now long past the era where technical hurdles prevented spinning > non-free off of Debian. We have a set of people that are capable of > maintaining it by itself. We also have a situation where non-free as > part of Debian is languishing, to the point where arguments that quality > would suffer if it is removed from Debian are, at the very least, > questionable. If this is the case, we don't need to take any special action. > To me, it's about living up to our own goals, and being the great force > in favor of Free Software that we can be. You do realize, don't you, that our current explicitly stated goals conflict with the goals you've claimed for us? [In particular, your idea that users need to be protected from non-free software is at odds with the social contract.] Maybe you should provide a proposal which states the goals you'd want us to be following. -- Raul