Thoughts on "Needs of users" vs. "Free software"
Ben Armstrong wrote:
> I personally believe that if this is what keeping non-free in our archives
> is going to do to the project, than we had better dump it, and fast. Unity
> in the project is far more important than continuing to support non-free
> as a "favor" to our users. It is not worth it. It does nothing now but
> cause strife and division. Each camp wants to portray the other either as
> "religiously fanatic free-software zealots" or "morally bankrupt non-free
> software lovers". The whole issue has escalated from what should have
> been a simple correction to remove ambiguity from our goals into a
> full-scale nuclear war of words. I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
It wasn't causing any strife or division until the GR was proposed.
Those people who cared about non-free worked on it, those who didn't,
didn't have to. The divisiveness was introduced by those who didn't
want to work on non-free and didn't want anyone else to do so either.
There is still functionality in non-free that isn't available in free
software. It is still better, from a user-experience point of view, to
have the non-free available and stress-tested with the distribution.
Saying that free software will fill the gaps is just promoting vaporware
- until the software exists, free still won't do everything non-free
can.
Forcing users to dl non-free stuff and build from source rather than use
apt is just going to drive away users, especially newbies. Making them
use a 3rd party apt-source, instead of one tightly bound to the
distribution, is going to cause problems with testing, which is going to
inevitably lead to "debian sucks, I can't do X Y or Z with it" and users
pitching it in favor of some other distribution.
I feel that the cause of promoting free software is best served by
having the best integrated and most stable distribution, attracting
newbies, and educating them about the merits of using free-speech
software, even if it is only by popping up a question "Are you sure you
want to install X, which is non-free?" when they use apt/dselect/dpkg.
If they're fed up enough with Windows to consider Linux, we should grab
them and educate them, but to do so we need to offer all the
functionality of the commercial distributions.
Driving them away to Red Hat/SuSE/Corel/etc where they can run non-free
packages without being told they aren't free-speech software, or the
difference between free beer and free speech isn't going to help the
cause any.
Starting with Woody, how about having the non-free packages recommend
the free package that provides the same functionality? Combined with
having the free package set to conflict with the non-free (likely to
already be in place), those who use dselect or one of the other newbie
friendly interfaces to apt (the kind of people least likely to be
knowledgeable about the difference between free-speech and free-beer
software) will be exposed to the free alternatives and be able to make
educated choices about what software they choose to run.
jpb
--
Joe Block <jpb@creol.ucf.edu>
CREOL System Administrator
Social graces are the packet headers of everyday life.
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