I installed vrms and decided to send you some ideas to sort non-free
package. (I did this with my vrms output)

1. Games

angband                   A single-player, text-based, dungeon
simulation
zangband                  A single-player, text-based, roguelike game

2. non-software

doc-html-w3               Recommendations of the W3
echo-linux                French on-line magazine "L'Echo de Linux"
hwb                       The Hardware Book
figfonts                  User contributed fonts for figlet
freefont                  Freeware font selection for X11

3. Patents problems
giflib3g                  shared library for GIF images (runtime lib)
giflib3g-dev              shared library for GIF images (development
files)
gimp-nonfree              GIF and TIFF support for the GNU Image
Manipulation P

4. no replacement

communicator-base-45      Popular World-Wide-Web browser software (base support)
communicator-smotif-45    Popular World-Wide-Web browser software (full static
navigator-base-45         Popular World-Wide-Web browser software (base support)
navigator-smotif-45       Popular World-Wide-Web browser software (full static
netscape-base-45          Popular World-Wide-Web browser software (base support)
  even if I use lynx most of the time it's the only available browser
  for 'complex' web-site. Waiting mozilla ...

xanim                     Plays Multimedia files
  I never search for sth else since I only use it twice a year.

unzip                     De-archiver for .zip files
zip                       Archiver for .zip files
  it's always gzip or bzip2 in the linux world but as soon as you live
  with windows people you need them :(

tetex-french              The french style files for (La)TeX
tetex-nonfree             non-free teTeX library files
  those are sometimes useful, not more.

distributed-net           donate unused CPU cycles - client for
distributed.net
  any free project to crack RC5 ?

5. Other

glimpse                   Full-text indexing and searching tools
  Suggested by dhelp

gs-aladdin                Postscript interpreter with X11 and svgalib
preview s
  ok, my fault.

libforms0.88              The XForms graphical interface widget
library
  for LyX waiting a GTK port ...


Conclusion : I could live on a free system :)
Implementation ideas :
  - putting docs and games apart is easy
  - for libraries :
    - if they're not needed (no depends to them) : ask to remove them
      (with dpkg --set-selections ?)
    - if they're only needed by one package : tell this package name
  - I don't think there's a way to suggest to remove glimpse - the
    best way would be to not suggest it (or that dselect doesn't go to
    conflict screen for 'suggests' (looks like this had already been
    discussed :) ))
  - patents : the idea is already in README
  - gs-aladdin provides gs which is also provided by free package gs :
    could suggest to use this instead
  - netscape : 5 entries for it ! there's certainly a way to only tell
    once about it (source field is netscape4.5 for all)

For RMS comments, I don't know if the transcript of the "SomeNet's third
online forum" is still available on the net (and even if it has
interesting enough comments) but if you want it I have a copy on my
hard disk.

Regards,
	Frederic