Re: free vs. non-free debate

[Guylhem Aznar <guylhem@oeil.qc.ca>]

On Tue, Nov 02, 1999 at 07:24:40AM -0600, Tim wrote:
> > Yeah! And also refuse to cover non-free HARDware ;-)
> Again, that's pretty much just muddying the waters, but this is in the end
> the point.  The line will become so fine in the end that we will only
> reduce the impact of the LDP.  *We* are here to offer assistance to the
> rest of the community in the form of documentation, we cannot lose sight
> of this.

Obviously, my initial message was not clear enough.

We are writing free documentation for the GNU/Linux operating system,
which can also take advantage of several freewares under special
licenses (like previous version of star office, mysql, netscape...) and
sharewares (xv...)

I think they fall in the "free" category, not as "libre software" but
"gratis" (shareware are gratis only for about 30 days) and therefore may
be used or at least tryied by many users.

However documentation for, say Oracle database, or some very expensive
software is out of the scope of the LDP.

We are here to offer assitance, adding 1M to the LDP directory for a
document which will be useless to 99.999% of the users is a non sense,
while many people will try star office, xv (...) and benefit of
documents explaining how to install or use them.

But if many authors *want* documents covering non-free software in the
LDP we could create a specific section to separate free and non free
software, ala debian.

-- 
Save Mumia Abu Jamal !!                http://ornitho.org/mumia/
Linux Documentation Project:           http://www.linuxdoc.org
Clef PGP/PGP key:                      http://oeil.qc.ca/~guylhem
Chez moi/At home:                      guylhem \@/ oeil.qc.ca


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