On Thu, Jun 08, 2000 at 04:29:11AM -0400, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote:
> Adam McKenna <adam-debian@flounder.net> writes:
> > I don't see how the status quo is particularly bad. As several people have
> > already noted, the reasons behind this proposal are mainly motivated by
> > politics.
> Being motivated by politics is often a noble thing. Do you think that
> having principles is bad? That we should endeavor to make our
> decisions in as unprincipled a manner as possible?
Hurting people in blind pursuit of principles can be bad. In this case,
we're harming people who use and maintain non-free software, either by
making it somewhat harder to obtain the software or removing all the
considerable existing infrastructure that can currently be used to help
maintain non-free software.
> In any case, the status quo has one serious problem: many users think
> that non-free is part of Debian. In fact, the only thing about it
> that is "not part of Debian" is that sentence.
Then why don't we make it clearer that main and non-free aren't equal? If
that's all we want to do, then we can do that without having to harm
anyone. See my posts to the "Clarifications" thread for one possibility.
> In all other ways,
> non-free participates fully in Debian, and lots of users and many
> developers think this resolution is about "removing non-free from
> Debian", which implies that they think that non-free is currently in
> Debian.
"Removing non-free from Debian" ? That is indeed what it's about: removing
all support for non-free from Debian. Just because something's not
part of our official distribution doesn't mean it's not part of Debian:
project/experimental, contrib, the web site are all counter examples.
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG encrypted mail preferred.
``We reject: kings, presidents, and voting.
We believe in: rough consensus and working code.''
-- Dave Clark
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