Re: Let's not forget why many people use/contribute to Debian
On Sat, Jun 17, 2000 at 08:20:37PM +0200, Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 17, 2000 at 12:07:57PM -0600, Dwayne C . Litzenberger wrote:
> > Right and free are not the same things. The GNU project wouldn't have gone
> > anywhere if RMS decided to refuse to support proprietary platforms.
>
> The effort of the GNU project allows to run free software on non-free
> operating systems. This is good, because it allows that more people learn
> about free software and use it.
>
> The question at hand is if Debian should distribute non-free software to be
> run on a free operating system. Can we agree that there is a difference?
>
> (I am not trying to make an evalutation here. People have made the point
> that this non-free software attracts more people and thus furthers free
> software [I disagree with the second part of this, btw]).
Many people still use non-free because when they started to need some
particular piece of software, there was no free equivalent.
It is very probable that there is such one now, but they may not know about it.
There was a good proposal to all non-free packages to suggest free replacements.
( I would even propose recomends if free replacement is significantly better/
non-free one is upstreamly-unmaintained and/or obsolete )
Is there a general (informal) consensus for this proposal, so I could fill
a few wishlist (normal could be flamed out) bugs ?
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