On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 at 11:38 AM, Paul van der Vlis wrote: > I agree with the FSF when they say: "Debian also provides a repository > of nonfree software". > > And even with my idea they could say: "Debian still has a repository of > nonfree software", and they have a point then. > What I want is to make some steps in the good direction: no non-free > software from the debian.org repositories.
I don't believe that putting the non-free software on a different set of infrastructure still maintained by Debian is meaningfully different to what we have now. Debian would still be providing non-free/contrib to our users and I imagine the FSF would still say "Debian still has a repository of non-free software". The only difference would be the URL where the non-free bits are located, which (IMO) is not meaningfully different to what we have now. >> Is there an opportunity to make the separation between what "is" and "is not" >> Debian even clearer, and to do it in a way that remains consistent with >> Debian's >> social contract? > > I think my idea would make it clearer. But not 100% sure it's worth the > work. Maybe there are other things more important. Fundamentally, the issue seems to be about the clarity of the distinction between Debian (the 'main' section) and non-free/contrib. Do we have any opinion from RMS or other FSF folks about what amount of clarity is required before they would consider Debian a "free distro"? Until we have that there isn't much point discussing potential levels of separation. For example if Fedora dropped all their non-free firmware and moved them to RPM Fusion (the repo of non-free bits for Fedora users), would that be enough for them to be added to the list of "free distros"? The non-free firmware would still be out there and still used by developers and users alike. I imagine this situation will persist until the Free Hardware movement eclipses the likes of Sony/Samsung/Apple/Dell and so on. -- bye, pabs http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise _______________________________________________ Fsf-collab-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/fsf-collab-discuss
