This last week, I've tried to get into Debian stuff a bit, after a few weeks of mostly nothing except for small d-i translation updates. One of the big things in the Debian planet is the ongoing vote on removing the non-free section.

I, as a supporter of the original GR of three or four years ago by John Goerzen, voted for the removal, mostly for philosophic reasons. I really think the place for most of those packages should be outside Debian mirrors, and would really like to see it continued in non-free.org or whatever.

There has been some discussion about the issue on PlanetDebian, started by Joey Hess, who explains that he voted in favour of the proposal for both a practical reason and another one more political. The first is that Debian Installer won't even ask new users if they want to use it (in Woody, it was still asked, defaulting to no), and users will be able to add it just editing their sources list. If they do this, they can just add a unofficial apt line which picks the non-free pieces. I agree with this. The second reason is that Debian, which is many times seen as the "most pure" free software collection, lately is having more and more issues with other big Free Software organizations like the FSF, which I feel is quite bad, because our goals are just the same. Of course, one of the roughest "issues" is our view on their free documentation license, but that's another story.

Following up to joeyh's post, I found Scott's post about this, where he explains that he voted against because some of the packages in non-free are there not for their non-DFSG compliant license, but because they are patent-encumbered material which cannot go in main. Well, I feel we should have this stuff in a separate section not called non-free, because it doesn't reflect what the problem is with those packages. For example, the GIMP stuff that creates LWZ-compressed .gif files could go in this category, while the rest of really non-free packages go away to non-free.org. It'd be the user's responsability to read about the legal issues with the packages in this section before deciding if it's legal for them to use it, just like they need to do with non-free licenses before they start using a non-free package.

On a related note: does anyone know if voting "1-2" and "132" in this GR gives the same points to the "keep non-free option"?

Some of the Debian GNOME maintainers are starting to package the imminent GNOME 2.6 in experimental, as it's probably too late to drop it in Sarge. Who knows, if we manage to get it in shape and tested quickly and other Sarge bits get delayed, we might try to drop it in unstable, but I don't count on having 2.6 in Sarge at this point. It also depends quite a bit on Marillat agreeing to upload 2.6 versions of his packages to experimental, which I'm not too sure about. Maybe our KDE folks are a bit more lucky and manage to stick their KDE 3.2.1 packages in Sarge in time. We'll see.

I finally got my new ATI Radeon 9200, and installed a few minutes ago. I had no problems to get X, DRI & friends to like it, but I think the display is slightly blurry. Maybe it's the monitor, but I don't think this happened with the Voodoo3.

I discovered that Wesnoth is quite a nice game, and quite addictive too... you've been warned.