Debian Prepares To Vote On Non-Free Software

DJFelix writes "Manoj Srivastava, Debian Project Secretary, has posted a proposed General Resolution regarding the handling of the non-free section of Debian. This is very important to me, as I am a Debian maintainer who only maintains non-free packages. If you are a Debian non-free maintainer or Debian non-free user who does not want to see the non-free section disappear from Debian, I highly suggest you get involved."

Comments

The Ultimate Question

[xilmaril]

this is quite an important decision.

freedom vs. usability?
freedom vs. laziness?

the difference is strictly opinion, I suppose

personally, I hope it disappears, but I can definetly see how that would hurt some people.

Re:Scare tactics

[xenocide2]

This runs deeper than you would think. Debian is built and steered by volunteers. Demonstrate a commitment and aptitude and you will be included in their group. Within this broad association of "Debian Developers" are a few who have some moral stick up their butt about anything not GPL'd.

It comes up reguarly but this is the first time (that I know of -- they don't keep a history of failed resolutions) that it wasn't dismissed out of hand. A few months ago someone came up with a magical list of software in non-free. The result was basically acroread, java and some decompression tools. This data comes from popcon. What they don't tell you there is what sorts of ways the pop-con program distorts things. Pop-con is not well known among users. It also requires a functioning mail server, something many desktop installations forgoe. Nearly every linux installation in our College of Engineering runs Debian, but they don't use pop-con. And the sample size of people reporting with popcon is fairly small compared to the actual size. One can argue that statistical sampling means a lot even at 10 percent of the population, but there's a good chance.

Myself, I run Debian unstable and hardly pay attention to what's non-free. I do know that some of my stuff, like the NVIDIA drivers packaged by Debian, are very non free and very useful. Acroread is also invaluable. If Debian drops support for non-free, I may be looking for a new distro. I wonder how UserLinux feels about the situation, given Bruce's GUI choices were based on being able to make software for any purpose without restriction, including commercial exploitation.