Re: Debian vs gNewSense

[Davi Leal]

I am personally interested in knowing the RMS' opinion about the below MJ's 
comments,   mainly if a split  debian.org / non-free.org  would qualify the 
Debian general project as "Free".


MJ Ray wrote:
> Davi Leal wrote:
> > MJ Ray wrote:
> > > gNewSense doesn't refuse to advertise Multiverse.  That's why it is
> > > easy to find out how to use them.  Unless something has changed, a
> > > simple question in any of the project discussion channels will get the
> > > instructions.  By "pretending that it doesn't exist" I mean not
> > > mentioning the existance on the project web site.  That's being silly.
> >
> > What a guy can write you at an IRC discussion channel is not an
> > 'official' position of a project.
>
> Well, in the strictest sense, I guess 'official' positions of
> gNewSense are the positions of the two project members, Brian Brazil
> and Paul O'Malley.  They both have discussed Multiverse's use with
> gNewSense on IRC and mailing lists, like in
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnewsense-users/2006-11/msg00195.html
> but I grant you, I have no recording of either actually explaining how
> to add it to your sources.list.
>
> Then again, they don't need to, because there are many others who will.
> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Repositories/CommandLine
> probably works just as well for gNewSense.  In short, there is a
> well-known ready-to-use repository of non-free programs out there for
> gNewSense.  We'd prefer people didn't use it, but it doesn't make
> sense to pretend it doesn't exist.
>
> One of the ideas suggested during the last debian vote about removing
> non-free from the mirror system was to split everything between
> debian.org and some not-owned-by-the-project non-free.org.  If that
> happened, would more FS supporters endorse debian?  Would debian get
> an unqualified "Free" on Davi's list?  If not, what's the difference
> between splitting debian.org and non-free.org and the current split
> between gnewsense.org and ubuntu.com?