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A Compromise Proposal on GR: Remove non-free



Greetings:  God bless you.

Noting the tension between proponents of purifying in Debian's support
for
Free Software by removing non-free from what is now unstable (woody),
and proponents of supporting the users of non-free software by
continuing
to host non-free -with good arguments on both sides (I favor keeping
non-free, but won't feel hurt by losing it, and yet admire the
purists)-,
I suggest that the non-free packages be replaced by installer
assistants,
that will fetch from CD, or the net, or from other media, the respective
source code packages, patch the makefiles and what-ever, compile and
install
the package, pretty much what the package maintainers have to do, but
they'll
just be off-loading the actually processing to the end-user.

That way:  

1) Debian will support the users of non-free software, in such a way
   as to retain the quality of the Debian FSH, etc.
2) the installer assistants will themselves be free, and maintained,
3) Debian can be completely free with no taint of hosting non-free.

The installers will only be scripts and patches, and will not _link_
to non-free, only _Depend_ing on the oppropriate free development tools,
while the _free_ scripts and patches would have to concern themselves,
in an AI manner of speaking, with whatever was needed to build
their targets, while the user, aided by the scripts, would have
to concern himself with making sure of access.

I can't make a formal proposal out of this, since I am not _yet_
a Developer (my application is _only_ a week old), but offer it
as a suggestion until then.



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