Raul Miller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > You keep talking like there's only one possible valid way of looking > at things -- and that's not beside the point, it's the main obstacle > preventing us from talking about what the point is.
I'm interested in hearing your way of looking at things, not your telling me that I won't listen to it. Please, do share it! > [1] Distribute a great, free operating system. > [2] Make it as useful as possible > > Non-free has nothing to do with [1], and is a crutch for [2] where we > don't have any better alternatives. I think that's a decent objective. But we have historically had things in non-free even when we did have alternatives. Things that go in main have to meet the DFSG, and the maintainers say-so is not enough to satisfy that things have. There is independent review, from the FTP masters and debian-legal about such things. So I would like to see non-free (if it remains) have a requirement that things be necessary, or only there in the absence of free alternatives, or something like that; and I think such a requirement should be enforced by more than the maintainer's say-so. > Instead, you're implying that people will feel more pressured by the > absense of non-free and will therefore they will fix the problems such > that [2] will cease to be an issue. No, that's not really what I'm doing. I hope that non-free.org would exist, and I would hope that the Debian packages now in non-free would find a home there. I would hope that users learn how to add the right apt-get line for it, just as they must learn to add non-free now. I agree with you that the non-free packages need to exist. What I disagree about is that it must be Debian's job to provide them. > And, granted, in some cases people might react to pressure positively > where they would not have otherwise. But, in tossing non-free, you're > tossing out a fair bit of the flexibility our project has to deal with > odd licensing problems. And for what? How do you see this flexibility working now? I think I don't understand the question, and I would like to be sure I do before I try to give an answer to it. Right now, the standards for main and contrib are very rigid and fairly precise, but we have in practice allowed for some flexibility around the timing of things (for example, the current lengthy delay in dealing with the GNU FDL). We have allowed anything whatsoever in non-free provided we have the legal right to copy it from our server in a convenient way. I don't view non-free as a wonderful tool for dealing with "licensing problems". Indeed, I would guess that we have been hampered by having upstream people say "well, we shouldn't make it free, after all, you'll still distribute it". I don't think that helps at all; if my guess is right, then the flexibility you praise is doing a detriment. I believe that we need to send the message to upstream authors that we stand for free software, and it is not our job to help them with non-free software. Where this is tricky is in helping our *users* with non-free software; I don't mind doing that nearly as much. But it is not in the long-term interests of our users to have non-free software. I believe our users are better served by having the difference in licensing be met with a clearly marked difference in the organizations providing the software. I do not believe our users are well served by the appearance that Debian is just fine with and happy to distribute non-free software. If we are going to do it, I believe we should do it grudgingly, not eagerly, and we should be constantly trying to stop when we can, and only continuing because we feel we must--and I believe that decision should be made package-by-package, and should not depend on just the decision of one maintainer. But this may not really respond to your question; I could only guess at just what you were looking for, so if it is not as responsive as you'd like, then please amplify the question a little or explain in more detail what the flexibility is that you have, and what about that flexibility helps our goals. Thomas
