Debian: too free?

Posted Apr 29, 2004 3:03 UTC (Thu) by piman (subscriber, #8957) [Link]

If you use non-free software, it is to your advantage to maintain that it is not part of Debian; the more people conflate the two, the closer Debian comes to *really* violating the SC, and the more people support removal of non-free.

Also, non-free isn't added by default to your sources.list, so it's not quite "transparently". Actually in sarge, it's (so far) not even asked about at all. Mostly because of the poor quality of all the packages in non-free.

Posted Apr 29, 2004 5:32 UTC (Thu) by branden (subscriber, #7029) [Link]

Hmm...if you go to the Debian stable packages list, you find Netscape listed. Sure, it says "non-free," and your computer will transparently get it from a different directory on the server, but it sure looks like part of the distribution to anybody who doesn't know better. There's a nice "download" button right there on the packages.debian.org server....

For what it's worth, I agree. But the majority of people who voted to retain the non-free section of the Debian archives apparently feel that the distinction is clear enough.

It may be that, collectively, Debian is attempting to manage a Solomonic bargain between these competing interests. After all, if anything blacklisted from main due to licensing or missing-source-code problems can come gently to rest in non-free, and it's just as trivial to retrieve that stuff from there as it was from main, perhaps both the "puritans" (Debian will ship only Free Software!) and the "completists" (Debian will ship everything we possibly can!) will be satisfied.

Perhaps... ;-)