Re: General Resolution: Removing non-free
Jeff Licquia wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 09, 2000 at 02:35:31AM +0200, Fabrice Gautier wrote:
> > While for the moment Debian have the power to label non-free packages
> > as non-free, keeping them in a sort of jail, it may lost this power be
> > letting them go into the void. A cool thing is that i don't need to
> > read every licence when install a Debian package. I know if it's DFSG
> > compliant or not looking at the section.
>
> Users who add other apt repositories besides our recommended ones are
> beyond our help in this regard, whether we nuke non-free or not.
Users _will_ have to add apt repositories if we nuke non-free,
making it a real mess of things. We'll witness needless
questions on -user about `where do we get the best SOMENAME
packages?', and we'll actually spend _more_ time dealing with
non-free software on mailing lists (since all other support will
be gone).
> As for non-free apt repositories that aren't clearly non-free: Every
> Debian package has a Copyright field which the user can look at to
> determine the licensing if they like. If it becomes a problem that
> lots of people omit it when they package stuff, we could put code in
> dpkg that throws a fit if the Copyright field is missing.
> Alternately, we could have apt give more information about what
> archives packages are coming from, so as to make a clearer distinction
> between official Debian packages and others.
The minimal impact of this GR on our users rests on a lot of
vaporware (improved apt-get, new ftp sites, bug reporting
systems, etc).
Peter
Reply to: