On Sat, Mar 06, 2004 at 12:16:08PM -0800, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote: > Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au> writes: > > > You can't argue for a change by saying that the current system's no good > > because it's the current system. > > I didn't say that, but apparently the thread has been lost. Sven > sounded like he was saying that at some point it would be the right > time to change, but not now. Which implies that "when" can't be > answered by "never". His later statements seem to have confirmed that > I misunderstood, and that he agrees with you that we should never > change our policy about non-free.
It will be the rigth time when we (and our user) are not forced to rely on non-free pieces of software to run debian. Thomas, please tell me, what is the licencing situation of the bios you run ? And if your motherboard has some defect, are you able to look at the source code for the chipset, and modify it, or possibly make sure there is not some unwanted trojan included there ? But i forgot, you only care about "non-free should not be distributed from debian", not about really running on a fully free plateform, and this will only happen the day Debian is ready to stop any relation with non-free companies, which includes dropping support for nvidia, and clearly stating so on our web pages, but which also includes stopping accepting money from Oreilly, which sponsored our debconf 2003, while at the same time refusing to free the ocaml-books licence for example. Are you ready for this yet ? And also, like said, altough i have some respect for Branden's reason, that we might use the removal of non-free as some negotiating stick against upstream not wanting to free the code, this wanting to drop non-free for hypothetical cosmetic reasons is nonsense. Friendly, Sven Luther
