Re: General Resolution: Removing non-free

[Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au>]

On Wed, Jun 07, 2000 at 04:30:03PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> The one you've missed is:
> 
>   4. Supporting non-free software gives nothing to Debian's users
> 
> This is blatantly false. Netscape versus Mozilla, Sun/Blackdown JDK versus
> Jikes/Kaffe, Pine versus Mutt, Info-Zip's zip/unzip versus minizip and
> miniunzip, Qmail versus Exim or Postfix, xv versus imagemagick, tin versus
> slrn. There're the things for which there aren't free replacements: lha,
> zoo, arj, mmix-src, snes9x, SATAN, povray.

while i agree in general with what you're saying, two specifics above
give the false impression that the non-free alternative is better than
the free. the first is "Pine versus Mutt" - mutt is heaps better than
pine. second is "Qmail versus [...] Postfix" - postfix is better than
qmail. 

xv versus imagemagick is also questionable. for some tasks, imagemagick
is much better than xv, for other tasks, xv is superior.

also, tin versus slrn is a matter of user preference. tin's easier for
beginners. slrn is better for advanced users.

craig

--
craig sanders