Re: GNU/Hurd section in webpages

[Marcus Brinkmann]

On Wed, Oct 15, 2003 at 01:47:02AM +0000, Robert Millan wrote:
> > Well, yeah.  Do you know if any of the distributions you listed are
> > committed to only include free software?
> 
> It depends on what you consider "commitment". For example, do you consider
> Debian to be commited to only include free software?

You know the answer.  Debian does provide non-free software to their users. 
In fact, as you probably know, the Debian social contract even says:

 We will support our users who develop and run non-free software on Debian

and
     We acknowledge that some of our users require the use of programs that
     don't conform to the Debian Free Software Guidelines. We have created
     "contrib" and "non-free" areas in our FTP archive for this software.

     [...]

     Thus, although non-free software isn't a part of Debian, we
     support its use, and we provide infrastructure (such as our
     bug-tracking system and mailing lists) for non-free software packages.

It's of course non-sense that non-free software isn't part of "Debian".
The only reason between free software and non-free software in Debian is
that the latter is not part of the official distribution and thus not part
of the release process.

At least in the past Debian used to install with a non-free repository
enabled by default in apt's sources.list.  I think today it asks the user if
he wants it, prominently pointing to it.

> > I am afraid we will only be able
> > to endorse those, although we might choose not to because of technical
> > reasons (we might still link to them in the links section).
> 
> What technical reasons? Did you rather mean practical?

I am mainly worrying about quality and grade of matureness.

Thanks,
Marcus

-- 
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' GNU      http://www.gnu.org    address@hidden
Marcus Brinkmann              The Hurd http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/
address@hidden
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de/