Non-free and free.

[Rick Jones <rickya@siservices.net>]

All:

	It has been decided by the creators of the SEUL project, that non-free
software will not be included in the SEUL distro base.  End of story.

	That is *not* unreasonable.  It insures the basic stability of the
distro to the largest extent possible in the current state of Linux. 

	They have also decided that such packages will be available as
"non-free/ optional" under the distro.  So let's drop that side of the
non-free issue, shall we.

	As far as portions of non-free software that *can* be distributed for
running apps without any hitches, as if they *are free*, such as the QT
libs, they can and should be included in the base distro.  *CAVEAT*:
After we are assured that the libs themselves are basically in a free
status when distributed for compatability with existing software rather
than as mandatory for some other software that is in base.

	As I understand it, QT is non-free as it pertains to software developed
around it, not in it's pre-compiled lib form.  So QT-dev packages would
be non-free but QT-lib would be, in effect, free.

	This is an outstanding concept actually.  It's too bad other software
libs like Motif don't adopt the same strategy.  That would make it more
appealing to programmers to develop around their package.  Has anybody
ever approached them about this type of concept?  Does anybody know?

Does it sound acceptable to include such pre-compiled libs in base?  Can
we set down some guildlines and make it so?