Debian mirrors - 1 views
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Shida Zhang on 15 Mar 11What are the specific reasons that some Debian packages couldn't be distributed in the States? Any specific examples for those packages?
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Duncan Gillespie on 16 Mar 11I'm not positive, but I believe that certain packages were not allowed to be distributed in the US because some of the software used in the Debian packages mimicked commercially available software. It may be similiar to how wikipedia got in trouble in its infancy because people would copy articles from encyclopedias like Britannica and make the information available for free. Like wikipedia, Debian is community driven (open-source).
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Debian is distributed all around the world using mirrors in order to provide users with better access to our archive and to reduce the load on our servers.
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Prior to Debian 3.1, there was also a Non-US packages archive (debian-non-US/) which included Debian packages that could not be distributed in the United States due to software patents or use of encryption.