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sm-discuss - Re: [SM-Discuss] SMGL as GNU-certified Free(R)(TM) Distro?

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  • From: Eric Sandall <eric AT sandall.us>
  • To: "Andrew \"ruskie\" Levstik" <ruskie AT mages.ath.cx>
  • Cc: sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Discuss] SMGL as GNU-certified Free(R)(TM) Distro?
  • Date: Sat, 5 Nov 2005 17:12:33 -0800 (PST)

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On Sat, 5 Nov 2005, Andrew "ruskie" Levstik wrote:
<snip>
5) Will the providers be added with z-rejected ? For instance, will I
have JAVA or not ?
No.
Why not...
PROVIDERS can still work... you would just need to manualy scribe add
z-rejected from-url
before casting.

The only thing you couldn't do would be to have a depends JAVA z-rejected
you could still have depends JAVA.

We would need to publish an active list of providers(if we don't yet) so that
others can use them to hook into the rest of the grimoires properly...

Nothing is preventing you there...

You couldn't even have 'depends JAVA' in the normal grimoire because
everything that provides JAVA is in z-rejected. So we'd have two
issues there:
1. Back to where we were when depends didn't know which grimoire it
was in.
2. If we do have some 'free' package that can provide JAVA, we can
do the above, but then any 'non-free' (e.g. jdk1.5-bin) that also
provides JAVA could not work with our system since we couldn't
tell the 'free' package to conflict with the 'non-free' (assuming
they both install some of the same libs/binaries/etc.).

Also, now a package that may be 'free' (e.g. eclipse) would have to go
in z-rejected, or you could have a broken package (eclipse would
install, but not run).

As I said before, I'm all for promoting free software (even the FSF
definition), but not at the price of, in any way, hampering our users
from (legally) using the software they want. If the FSF definition
would let us keep references to non-free software in our 'free'
branch, then almost all of my complaints about their requirements
would go away (other than the stupidity of not being able to
distribute legally distributable files on our servers because the FSF
doesn't like them).

- -sandalle

- --
Eric Sandall | Source Mage GNU/Linux Developer
eric AT sandall.us | http://www.sourcemage.org/
http://eric.sandall.us/ | SysAdmin @ Inst. Shock Physics @ WSU
http://counter.li.org/ #196285 | http://www.shock.wsu.edu/
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