Re: Packages with non-distributable distfiles

[Aleksej Saushev <asau%inbox.ru@localhost>]

Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%britannica.bec.de@localhost> writes:

> On Fri, May 25, 2012 at 03:29:24PM +0400, Aleksej Saushev wrote:
>> You may believe it, but your beliefs should not impede others.
>> We're not GNU, and this world still has IP laws. Some software has to be
>> bought (licensed) in order to be used, and there's significant number of
>> users who don't see anything wrong with it.
>
> *sigh* Can we please go back to the original proposal? It was very
> explicit about NOT covering commercial software as long as there is a
> maintainer to ensure that the software can be bought.

Commercial software isn't updated at the same rate as some packages from GNU.
One could have bought some package up to ten years ago and still
continue using it. Consider one popular operating system from Microsoft.
If the package builds and works, there's no reason to remove it just
because some other people cannot find distfiles.

Abandonware argument is really weird here. We continue supporting
similar opensource abandonware even at the price of mirroring distfiles,
while support for commercial abandonware is basically zero since we
don't need to waste space on file server.

Your original proposal is bad in its current form for similar reasons.
Besides one quarter being too short, if we want to follow proposed rule,
we need service that periodically checks distfiles' availability
and sends public notifications when they become unavailable.
For software that isn't offered publicly, I don't know how you're
going to check it. The cost is annoyingly high, you propose to force
maintainers to do hard work just to save few kilobytes of disk space.


-- 
HE CE3OH...