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Will Debian Remove 'Non-Free'?
An anonymous reader writes "A Debian General Resolution for removing the non-free section from Debian archives is being discussed by Debian Folks and the debate is turning into a flamefest. The proposal is aimed to clarify the position of Debian toward Free Software and the fact that non-free is not (and has never been) a part of the Debian System. But this would exclude packages such as Netscape, the JDK or pine of the Debian archives and opponents argue that the proposal breaks the section 5 of the Debian Social Contract. Here's where it started." Since I'm not a Debian Maintainer (hey, but a few of my old apps are in there, can I vote? ;) I've only got an opinion. I think Debian users should be able to install things like Netscape and Pine too, but I think they should be told the implications. The reality tho, is that if it gets yanked from non-free, other servers will pick it up. Maybe that is the hint that the non-free section is different from Debian's goal. Some people use Debian because it's better, not because it's the most free.
i use debian on my server because of the power of dselect and dpkg, and because the logo looks cool :). but face it, linux almost certainly wouldn't be here today if Netscape hadn't ported. don't lie to yourselves and say that there was an alternative. pine is a great email package, and Java is necessary today. getting rid of them out of the standard Debian distribution is just a nuisance-most people will install at least one of those three anyway, so why make them download it out of a quasi-political stance?
Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
-- H. L. Mencken
Debian is a non-profit trying to promote free software. They are only providing non-free software as a convenience. They should stop providing if at least one of two conditions are met:
1) The user's need reduces. For instance, as free packages replace non-free ones (Mozilla for Netscape, let's say). If the user wants the non-free alternative, let them get it themselves.
2) If the task of providing becomes too onerous. For instance, disk space. There must be GIGABYTES of non-free Linux software out there, even if you only count the items that have debian packages.
Remember, Debian IS running a charity here. Why should a charity promote (in the money-making sense) other people's software?
--
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- For netscape there's Mozilla
- For pine, well, use another email client.
- For JDK, there's kaffe (it's coming along nicely)
- For Motif, there's Lesstif
One of the things that seperates Debian from the other distros is that it's dedicated to having Open Source software, unlike commercial distros which have no fear of packaging non-free software.Visit
Actually, I started using Linux because of it is Free. I had heard about the OS, and read a little about Linux. The more I looked at it, the more fascinated I was. When I started the process of picking a distro for my first install, I read up about the various offerings; the one I selected was Debian, because of its non-commercial and adamantly Free nature.
;)
.debs around for software that I might need for some reason or another. Hell, I use WinNT at work; I certainly can imagine grabbing a non-free package at some point.
.debs they work on.
Debian also lets me gloat about wonderful features such as apt-get, so its not just philosophically better
Should they host non-free? Actually, as a first time Linux user, I had no trouble making the distinction in their current format. In part, this may be because I was attracted to Debian because of its philosophy; I understood the distinction and left non-free off of my system. I wouldn't complain if they decided to host the non-free repository on another server. But I would hope that there is still a source of
Make the distinction clear. Make it an extra line to type in apt-sources. Host the stuff on another machine. But give maintainers somewhere to host the non-free
As poor www.debian.org is having to take a bit longer under the load, how about
Social contract uk Germany South Africa Japan Brazil
The Start uk Germany South Africa Japan Brazil
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Why is it that everyone who refers to the strawman linux "zealot" sound a bit zealous themselves?
There is actually a very pragmatic reason for only including "free software": it reduces the risk of tripping over a restrictive license. I'm sure the debian guys and gals would be very careful about what to include in the distribution, but what happens when the publishers change the redistribution rights? What was suddenly a staple application in one release of debian could suddenly be gone in the next, greatly inconviencing users. Now, what would you have debian do in this situation? Screw it's users by leaving the software out, or screw it's users by bending to the will of a commerical software publisher?
Am I breaking any license if I install a non free package on debian?
Am I breaking any license if I put debian and some non free packages on the same CD?
Am I breaking any licenses if I modify the debian setup in such a way that it accessess and installs the non free packages?
If the answer to all of the above questions is NO, then please explain to me what this discussion is about. If the answer is YES, please explain.
Jilles
Yesterday I got moderator privelages: today I have moderated. Now I will revoke that moderation in order to post.
Debian is something of a bedrock amongst the free software and opensource camps. It is the most consciously, self-aware and organised project of its kind, anywhere. It exists solely for what it perceives as the greater good. Money is not the aim - the aim is to uphold principles.
Much like the roman Res Publica of old, the Debian project enjoys a sophisticated governmental structure. In a sense, Debian is the wise old head of distributions, moving at a stately pace across both technological and ideological landscapes. It brings a strength and enduring quality that other projects could well lack. Quite simply, Debian will not die because of commercial whim nor lack of interest.
I think that we, the wider programming and user community, should look on this tolerantly. For Debian, this proposal is quite radical: an amendment to the Social Contract on which stands all of the actions. This is like a US statesman proposing an amendment to the Bill of Rights in nature, a fundamental reform or change to a very important document.
But, ultimately, Debian will decide. I do not think it is our place to judge them, whichever way they may turn. The fact is that Debian examplifies a non-anarchic model in a community where benevolent dictatorial anarchy (if you can use such a term!) is revered. It has long been run by wiser hackers than the most of us, and will be run by wiser hackers long after the frothing mob of Slashdot has passed.
Consider also the outcomes.
Debian will probably come under a lot of fire if it choses this path, by some fire-branding types in the same mould as the person proposing the Resolution. It would hurt the "image" of Debian as the most free of the free. On the other hand, I do not believe that Debian, taken as a whole, would care what people think of it. Nor will pragmatists who admire Debian for its technical excellence.
Internally it will cause continuing friction between camps. Certainly, a rejection at this stage would make later proposals even more bitterly contested ("We've rejected this already!"). In the most extreme circumstance, the pro-camp may fork Debian. I do not expect this to happen, however.
Debian will come under some fire for this path, but not so much. The pragmatists in the hacker world seem to be less voiciferous than the ideologists. Linus will rise above it all in his usual zen-like serenity.
Internally, I expect pressures will be less intense than the "no" option. It is far harder to undo such a thing than it is to do it, hence the pressure to undo will be less than the pressure would have been to do. And, obviously, the matter won't come up again in that "to do" form.
Whatever happens, I'll be watching with interest. For while this is a Debian matter, Debian is one of the strongest corps of the Freedomware community. What happens to them will have spill-over consequences for others.
be well;
JC.
--
"Don't declare a revolution unless you are prepared to be guillotined." - Anon.
Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.
If the Debian group doesn't want to promote commercial software through their charitable organization, so be it. They exist to support Free Software, not to offer every choice available under the sun.
To take your argument seriously, they'd be including Windows with their next distribution as a matter of freedom of choice. :P
You know what to do with the HELLO.
You know what to do with the HELLO. ...
Help create an open-source world
Some people use Debian because its better, not because its the most free.
And those people will convert to a Debian-based distribution that includes Netscape etc.
Let Debian do what they want; there's room for all sides here.
--
Don't give up freedom for comfort!
Keep it pure and don't be swayed from your goals. The Debian team is doing a hell of a job and don't want to see them "taint" their GNU/Linux distro with non-free and/or commerical software.
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
Uhm, I have an Nvidia GeForce card, and I run Debian. The Nvidida drivers will *never* be available from Debian servers, unless Nvidia changes their license. (current license forbids redistribution) So this doesn't affect you at all. On a related note, I *do* have the latest Nvidia drivers installed. Just because they aren't on ftp.debian.org doesn't mean they can't be used with a Debian box. I think this is a common misconception about the effects of this proposal.
Once again, we see Free Software supporters acting like zealots, putting some ill-founded political principle in favour of the needs and desires of their users.
-hypocritical mode on-
You are quite right. Whatever you need and want should be first and foremost in the minds of Debian. After all, they are here to make a profit, and making a profit requires satisfying users without concern for whatever ethics may have brought you, as a sys admin, to make debian packages in the first place.
Believe me, I expect to find Netscape, KDE, Pine et al. as part of my linux distro. And if it's not there, then why go through the arse of downloading all this extra stuff, when Mandrake gives you everything you need?
Well, of course, right again. Why not package everything you can ? Who cares about freedom anyway ? When you find that bug in netscape that locks it up on pages with Java, and you submit it back to netscape, you can expect that bug fixed immediately. Or at least within the normal turnaround time of commercial software.
--hypocticial mode off--
Which is to say nearly never. And when you find that there is some subtle bug that you know you can fix and contribute back to the authors, please write them and ask them for their source so you can help them by helping yourself.
Come on guys, stop acting like some petty Stallmanesque psychonauts, and start thinking about what's best for your users, and hence for Debian, because without users, you are as nothing.
Debian would exist if only for the sake of its packagers. Of course it is much larger than that. Their packages take care of all the little details that sys admins would otherwise need to do. The cron jobs are nicely done. The initscripts are very clean. Security is tight. And I am comparing Debian to other non-Debian distributions. Debian exists to provide the kind of distribution that its packages want to provide. And maybe that is "free". Maybe it is "open source". But the primary goal of the distribution is not its user base.
Debian also can act as the basis for commercial distributions, such as Corel. Any non-free programs can be provided - just by someone else.
So get used to it. Some packagers of software want to produce software the way they think software should be. And they KNOW that will provide substantial benefit to the software industry. And that is good enough for them. Not everything and everybody needs to cater directly to the user base. And if that makes the Debian packagers zealots in your mind, so be it. They have good software to build. And they do a very good job at it.
The more I see the antics of the Debian folks, the more it seems that they're pretty much just a shill for the prohibitively uncompromising antics of the Free Software Foundation
... just yet.
Debian would be the first to admit that they are noncompromising. They have a social contract that they are quite proud of. Further, they do have close ties with the FSF. They are very open about all of this. It defines who they are.
Debian should remove Linux from their distribution and replace it with HURD.
Yeah, because Linux isn't free software, so it goes against their whole philosophy to use it. Infact, Debian's purity is obviously polluting the Linux kernel by being involved with it. Wait...Linux is GPL. Linux is not FSF, but it is definately free software. Incidentally, there is a version of Debian built around HURD, but it's not very usable yet. Still, use it if you like.
It's either that, or it's time to get off the high horse and include things that make Linux a useful operating system.
Why on earth would they do that? If they included proprietary packages, then Debian would be Just Another Linux Distro, as opposed to being the bastion of purity that they want to be. I don't think you truly understand what Debian is about. Further, the argument is that there is no longer a need to use non-free. Most everything there has been reimplemented in a free manner.
You may not be sympathetic to Debian's cause, but if you're not interested, then there is no reason that it should affect you. This little debate is internal to Debian. The rest only know about it because someone posted it to slashdot.
Personally, I think that Debian should deprecate non-free and remove the directory from us.debian.org . If it is only hosted on secondary servers, it emphasizes the fact that those packages are a not part of the main distribution. Then they can start removing packages at first feasibility. For instance, now that OpenSSH supports ssh2, there is no real reason to keep around the non-free version of ssh. However, I really don't think that Mozilla is up to replacing Netscape
I think that this change is very much in keeping with Debian's goals, but I also think it should be taken a bit slowly.
--Lenny
Just so people have an idea of what Debian's non-free tree looks like:
netscape, xanim, mysql, acroread, unzip, java jdk, tao, nedit, xmame, povray, xv, majordomo, pine, distributed.net's deal, solid sql, archie, big brother, cIRCus, cucipop, mrouted, rat, nntpcache, tin, trn, mpg123, glimpse, gpg (idea, rsa, rsaref modules), pgp, dqs, omniorb, ucbmpeg, cyrus imapd
Most of this I could probably live without, but MySQL, Cyrus IMAPd, netscape, acroread, mpg123 (used by a lot of other peices of sw), pgp (need backdwards compatibility, and majordomo (come on, even linux-kernel uses this) don't really have decent full-featured equivilents.
The question really comes down to how many resources do maintaining these non-free packages take? I would assume the bulk of the time is put upon the packager which volunteered to handle it anyway. The space requirements is only about half a gig and there really aren't that many packages.
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
"Doing it in maybe 2 years time - THAT would be ok. But, don't remove it before we've got tools to replace it."
That is EXACTLY their proposal. The move will affect the Woody distribution, which they estimate will be released in 2 years.