I am not sure if this is a troll or not. I'll assume it is not.
The Gnome project is actually much larger than Red Hat's involvement. All of the code that Red Hat develops for the project is free. Gnome software had been developed rapidly, and is in a state of turmoil. It has apparantly taken quite a bit of work for the Debian developers to package it. But this is not because RedHat was obfuscating anything. The realtionships between packages in Gnome 1.0 should be clearer, since it is a stable release. It will take quite a bit of work, but the Debian people will get it packaged for Debian 2.1.
I think that Wichert is not talking about anything like swearing an oath on some document. The interview is just to see if the developer-to-be understands what Debian is, and that it is 100% free software. The developer can still upload non-free packages to the non-free section (if their licenses allow this). Understandably, the developer must agree that everything in the main part of the distribution consists of free software and that binary only software and shareware and warez and whatnot cannot be included in a free distribution. The interview is meant to try to avoid possible misunderstandings.
Slashdot Mirror
I am not sure if this is a troll or not. I'll assume it is not.
The Gnome project is actually much larger than Red Hat's involvement. All of the code that Red Hat develops for the project is free. Gnome software had been developed rapidly, and is in a state of turmoil. It has apparantly taken quite a bit of work for the Debian developers to package it. But this is not because RedHat was obfuscating anything. The realtionships between packages in Gnome 1.0 should be clearer, since it is a stable release. It will take quite a bit of work, but the Debian people will get it packaged for Debian 2.1.
I think that Wichert is not
talking about anything like swearing an oath on
some document. The interview is just to see
if the developer-to-be understands what Debian is,
and that it is 100% free software. The developer
can still upload non-free packages to the non-free
section (if their licenses allow this). Understandably, the developer must agree that everything in the main part of the distribution consists of free software and that binary only software and shareware and warez and whatnot cannot be included in a free distribution. The interview is meant to
try to avoid possible misunderstandings.
John Lapeyre