[arch-general] Packages with non free licenses

[Aaron Griffin]

On Dec 18, 2007 2:33 AM, Grigorios Bouzakis <grbzks at gmail.com> wrote:
> Is Archlinux reconsidering license issues with the binary packages
> residing at its repos?
> It certainly seems so...
>
> http://archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2007-December/003780.html
> http://archlinux.org/news/374/

Not in a general, policy sense, no. I, personally, am of the opinion
that if there is a open source alternative of equal or better quality
then it is preferred. If an alternative doesn't exist, or the
alternatives are lacking in quality (for instance nvidia vs nv), then
the closed source one is preferred.

This, however, is just my opinion. Removing Ion3 is slightly different.

> I have been meaning to ask, AFAIK besides the codecs package the same
> license have ttf-ms-fonts. Is there any change to see them in
> unsupported too?
> IMO the fonts are a more complex issue than the codecs one, since most
> users have them installed. Theres already an AUR entry for them in
> unsupported

If you can do some testing here to see WHAT these fonts should be
replaced with, and what looks good, that'd be appreciated. I'd, again,
be personally fine with the switch, but as you said the fonts are a
far more complex issue.