Re: [Fsuk-manchester] Talking about non-free software on the list

[MJ Ray]

Bob Ham <address@hidden>
> On 2013-02-21 15:13, MJ Ray wrote:
> > apparently it's not a free system distribution mainly because the
> > project makes it too easy to discover that non-free software exists.
> > Like anyone didn't know already.  Heck, the Free Software Definition
> > mentions non-free programs!  Should FSF be condemned for recommending
> > non-free software?  Or does whether it's a recommendation depend on
> > who's talking about it?
> 
> This is a straw man.  The Free Software Definition describes the 
> concept of non-free software, it doesn't recommend non-free programs and 
> it doesn't explain how to go about acquiring them. [...]

No, it leaves the explanations to subsites about Vista, Windows 8, the
MSDNAA scheme and so on.  (Personally, I don't think they're
recommendations, but I don't think the debian project's are either.)

> Mentioning non-free software is not the issue.  Instructing users on 
> how to install non-free software is one of the issues, along with 
> encouraging the use of non-free software.

I'm not sure that happens.  It's not in the installation howto and I
don't really have time to review the whole Debian Doc Project.  Maybe
when that report mentioned on fsf-collab is published, we'll know if
there are any, or if it's just about the repositories location.

Maybe some debian developers provide instructions on how to do it, but
they should be free to do that, even if we wouldn't - after all, don't
we hate that we're not allowed to share instructions on how to
circumvent TPM any more?

[...]
> Putting these issues aside though, Debian recommends non-free software 
> explicitly by having packages whose Recommends or Suggests fields point 
> to packages from contrib or non-free.

No, it doesn't.  To quote the Debian policy manual: "In addition, the
packages in main must not require or recommend a package outside of
main for compilation or execution..."

The only incidents I remember are where some development leads to a
discovery that a package is non-free (RFC code before IETF relicensed
was one... some fonts, too) and it gets thrown out of the
distribution, permanently or temporarily.

Perhaps you were thinking of Ubuntu?  ;^)

Hope that informs,
-- 
MJ Ray (slef), member of www.software.coop, a for-more-than-profit co-op.
http://koha-community.org supporter, web and library systems developer.
In My Opinion Only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
Available for hire (including development) at http://www.software.coop/