A conversation with Bdale Garbee

[ Thanks to Sam Varghese for this link. ]

"In that regard, I picked a couple of them myself and over the last couple of weeks I have successfully got to the point where we're now ready to close the two bugs in the Debian bug-tracking system related to glx. SGI took an action, back in September I think it was, to relicence the code in question and what needed to happen after that was to contact all of the individual developers who had made contributions on top of their original work to confirm that they all agreed to the licence change and we got the last confirmation on Thursday (January 15).

"As soon as I have a chance to catch my breath a little bit, we'll process all of that and close those bugs. This is the kind of thing that has to happen, we have to be willing to just do the grunt work of stepping through and resolving these things.

"The longer term question of what the role of the non-free side of the distribution should be in Debian is, I think, a more difficult question. There have been a lot of ideas posted recently that I find myself agreeing with, suggesting that always having a place where we explicitly put software that doesn't meet the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) that indicates that it doesn't meet our guidelines and yet is of interest to our users, seems like a valuable thing."

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