fun w/ rms

[der.hans]

Am 24. Apr, 2001 schwäzte Derek Neighbors so:

> It's about philosphy of what is important to you.  BTW: Red Hat GPL's
> about everything they write and even gives copyright to FSF.  The
> difference I believe you are talking about here is that Red Hat will
> include non-free and even non-Open Source software with its
> distribution. Debian does not. That alone doesnt make one better than

Actually, it does. I've had Netscape on debian for quite some time. It
doesn't, however, pay licenses for other stuff as RedHat used to
do. RedHat used to pay to include Xi X window system and BRU among other
things.

> the other, its just a political statement Debian chooses to make to
> try to get people to care about thier freedom.

Not all of debian is Free Software or nothing. Many of the debian
developers are. Since debian's decisions are generally made publicly as
are the debates it's more obvious what individuals think.

Just to show that all of debian isn't Free Software the original Open
Source Definition came from a debian guy, Bruce Parens, and was the Debian
Free Software Guidelines ( DFSG[0] ) with a couple of additions.

The key difference might be "We will support our users who develop and run
non-free software on Debian, but we will never make the system depend on
an item of non-free software."

ciao,

der.hans

[0] http://www.debian.org/social_contract.html#guidelines, part of the
Debian Social Contract, http://www.debian.org/social_contract.html.

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