"Tristan Day" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > After loads of problems with LSL ( after 2 weeks they wrote back to me > saying my credit card was out of date because 1/10/98 in England means 1st > October and over in America it's 10th Jan, and I wrote back correcting them > but they said that I have to use another card) > > I am facing a real dilemma with Distribution disks. If X becomes non-free, > there will be no point buying a Debian distribution CD if I am correct<??> > > I mean, if X isn't on there, I'll have to dnld everything anyway, or buy Red > Hat <??> > > What a pain. X is a large part of Debian, it's stupid to make it non-free...
As has been said many, many times, all the annoucement means is that X11R6.4 from the open group will become non-free. X11R6.3 will remain free - there's nothing the Open group can do about this. And the XFree86 people will continue develop, support, and improve their X stuff. (and so we may very well see XFree86 producing their own X11R6.4) So, in short: DON'T PANIC. X will remain a part of Debian now and in the foreseeable future; futermore, it will remain free. (this is one reason the DFSG are written the way they are - once free, always free [1]) X development may be slowed down a bit, but I don't at the moment see any reason to be worried by that. [1] This doesn't mean that one can't create a DFSG free product, and then decide to make subsequent versions of the product non-free. However, the versions that are released with DFSG compatible licences will _always_ be DFSG free. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]