My take on that part: On Fri, Jan 20, 2006 at 11:20:32AM +0200, Fabian Fagerholm wrote: > The GR proposal apparently results in useful GFDL-covered material to be > moved to the non-free section. In a previous GR, Debian has reaffirmed > support for non-free. Is it a conscious motive or an accidental > side-effect of this GR proposal to work towards supporting a Debian > system where users can decide for themselves what "level of freeness" > they wish to have, complete DFSG-freeness being the strictest possible > choice? Will the next step be to alter the Social Contract to no longer > say that contrib and non-free are not part of the Debian system (?5)?
When we voted to 'reaffirm non-free' the usage of non-free was comparativly higher (netscape and acroread were popular, neither of them are in sarge). In the last years, a number of non-free packages has been relicensed to a DFGS-free license, and a number of others have been relicensed in a way that make them non-redistributable by Debian. The popularity-contest usage for non-free <http://popcon.debian.org/non-free/by_vote.gz> show that there not much interest in nonfree. A large part of nonfree are previously assumed DFSG-free software that were discovered non-free. Moving GFDL-covered packages there only continue this trend. A popular misconception is that nonfree is mainly for proprietary binary-only apps (netscape, acroread, SUN JDK, Macromedia flash, etc.). None of them are in non-free today. Moving the GFDL-covered packages to non-free might increase non-free usage, but I don't see how having non-free softwares in main can be any better. Cheers, -- Bill. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Imagine a large red swirl here. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
