On Fri, 05 Dec 2014 21:16:40 -0300
hellekin <hellekin@???> wrote:


Someone mentioned dropping support for contrib and
> non-free. I would support that.

With respect, I would not advocate such an approach without more
information as to what Devuan would do with the software in those
areas.

Dropping Debian's contrib and non-free sections completely would render
a number of real world use cases, such as flash, video/audio
codecs, and a large number of drivers useless because they have no
firmware support.

As a counter proposal, I would rather see Devuan drop the whole
designation of contrib and non-free entirely, by combining them in a
"community" section which can be supported by users in an unofficial
capacity, thus freeing limited developer resources for work on the
important parts. It would also have the effect of saying "We don't
support this officially, but here the packages are. You take all legal
responsibility for licenses and patents."

It's no worse than what Fedora and other versions of Linux already do,
and in many ways would be better because the code would come from
Devuan rather than having to look in a third party archive, which may
or may not be accessible or broken.