Re: why not replace individual programs?
On Sat, Jun 10, 2000 at 06:30:10PM +0200, David N. Welton wrote:
> If people really want to do something useful, which will show in a
> practical way that we can do without non-free software, why don't you
> take all of the programs in non-free, and make a hit list. Examine
> them and see if there is a free replacement that is every bit as good
> as the original. If so, maybe that program doesn't need to be in
> Debian any longer. If not, you have a bit of *real* work to do to
> help out the free software effort, which will result in real benefits,
> not just mailing-list wanking. This is a workable idea that will have
> real results, and piss off a lot less people.
I like your idea and I remember that someone made a similar proposal some
months ago. gnuhtml2latex was an example. I think of nano, free clone fo
pico, as another example.
By the way, we can (ab)use non-free software to create more and more
free product. It's important to convince people that free software is
good, and creating free alternatives for most used applicatione is an
important help for such a project.
Maybe popularity-contest could help us. We know that pine and netscape are
very important. Mozilla exists, but what about pine? It si possible to
"muttify" pine, but is this enough?
Here a list of non-free software and possibile free alternatives:
* acroread -> xdpf or xpdf-i
* pgp -> gnupg (even if to handle older keys we need idea and rsa modules
that are not free)
* application made with xforms:
xfmail -> there is archimedes, clone in gtk, but not usable now
lyx -> ?
* mpeg players: we have smpeg-gtv, so can we avoid ucbmpeg or xanim?
* other video players, I think no alternatives, only xanim with its
modules
* xv: do alternative viewer make what xv does? gtksee, gqview, imagemagick
Then we should avoid gif and tiff, or we will need gimp-nonfree.
What about mp3 player? What is the legal situazion for them?
Then?
--
| Christian Surchi | www.firenze.linux.it/~csurchi | www. |
| devnull@inwind.it | christian@firenze.linux.it | gnu. |
| FLUG: www.firenze.linux.it | Debian GNU/Linux: www.debian.org | org |
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