Evan Leibovitch wrote:
> Who died and made the Debian Project judge of what's free? I dislike
> movements that assume the user base is stupid and can't make up its own
> mind on what's "free" enough. The freeware concept gained acceptance in
> the public long before Debian saw the need to draw boundaries around it.
Okay. As a fellow Debian developer, I've got to respond to this.
Nobody died and made us judge of anything. But we have to decide, _in
the context of our own project_, what constitutes "free enough"
software. Since we're a pretty large and diverse bunch, we needed to
come up with standards which we all mostly agree with, to avoid having
to have a massive flame war over each and every package.
Now, there are many people who like our standards and make use of them
themselves. Eric Raymond likes them, and that's why his "Open Source"
definition is based on our social contract. If you don't like it, or
think it's too strict, that's fine. But we have never forced our
definition on anyone else.
> To be certain, there are a number of models out there that push the
> envelope and aren't universally considered "free"; two examples are Kermit
> and the semi-commercial Qt toolkit on which KDE is based. So you have
> different visions of what's acceptable; Qt is supplied with the Caldera
> distribution of Linux but not Red Hat.
These distributions have their own internal policies about what is free
enough to go in. So do we. The difference is that we have formalized
our principles and stated them publicly.
> There are many reasons for deciding whether or not to build Qmail support
> into exim; Debian's definition of freeware should not be such a reason.
Nobody has claimed it should. Our definition of freedom is why _we_
don't want to run qmail for our mailing lists; it has nothing to do with
why exim should or should not support qmail features.
Don't panic!
--Galen
--
*** Exim information can be found at
http://www.exim.org/ ***
