can i ask something regarding debian?

[Colin Watson]

On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 04:14:28PM -0400, Doug wrote:
> On 10/27/2011 04:14 AM, Colin Watson wrote:
> >On Wed, Oct 26, 2011 at 04:00:27PM -0400, Doug wrote:
> >>    Debian is politically committed not to have anything even remotely
> >>    connected to something proprietary, or developed by any entity that
> >>    might have connections to something commercial.
> >This is an exaggeration of Debian's position to the point of
> >misrepresentation; Debian is certainly committed to free software, but
> >that doesn't exclude commercial involvement.  Let's keep it accurate!
> 
> Oh, yeah?  Let's see you get Thunderbird or Firefox on Debian.

So you claim that that's because Mozilla is a commercial entity?
Interesting.  Let's see.  Just off the top of my head, here are some
notable Debian packages strongly associated with commercial entities:

  MySQL (MySQL AB / Oracle)
  Berkeley DB (Sleepycat Software / Oracle)
  CUPS (Apple)
  Ghostscript (Artifex Software)
  PowerTOP (Intel)
  OpenJDK / IcedTea (Sun / Oracle, Red Hat)
  vast amounts of stuff (Red Hat)
  AppArmor (Novell, Canonical)
  Erlang (Ericsson)
  GCC (several companies, notably CodeSourcery)
  Qt (Trolltech / Nokia)

... to say nothing of course of all the contributions by commercial
organisations to the Linux kernel.

Debian quite manifestly does not care whether packages are developed by
commercial entities.  It cares about the *terms*; as is right and
proper.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]