Re: "Social Contract GR's Affect on sarge" or "Debian commits suicide"

[Nathanael Nerode <neroden@twcny.rr.com>]

Joe Buck wrote:
<snip>
> Exactly.  And it is *that* that you might want to apologize to the
> debian-devel list for: not for asserting that AJ was wrong about the
> social contract and the DFSG,
Or indeed for insulting him, since I can't really apologize for that 
without lying.   Well, I did my best to craft an honest apology which 
contains no further insults.

<snip>
> > > > From where I sit, AJ was guilty of the crime of pragmatism...
>
>
> > I see.  So you're saying that AJ judged the meaning of the Social 
> > Contract fundamentally by prior actions, not by the text at all?  This 
> > is certainly an point of view which is quite hard for me to comprehend.
> > It also doesn't seem fit with his statements about his view.
>
>
> Well, not quite;
Yes quite.  It was precisely what you say *until* someone pointed out 
that the Social Contract actually wasn't textually ambiguous in a way 
which allowed non-DFSG-free documentation, and the explanation for that 
was carefully and politely repeated on several different lists.  My 
hostility level, and that of others, rose significantly after that was 
identified and ignored.  Which was months ago.  (In case you missed it, 
if "Debian will remain 100% Free Software", and documentation isn't 
software, how can Debian contain documentation at all?)

(If you actually disregard the text in *favor* of prior actions, you can 
get a reasonable position.  There were people who did something similar 
to that; they suggested amending the Social Contract to say "Debian will 
remain a collection of Free Software and other works", on the grounds 
that that was what was meant, or what should have been meant.  Which was 
a reasonable view, although there are a lot of people who politely 
disagreed.)

> it's more like using prior actions to reason about points
> where the DFSG appears to be ambiguous.   It said "free software", as did
> the social contract.  Is documentation software?  Based on previous
> actions, one might think that the writers of the contract didn't think so,
> but maybe they just didn't notice.  The new GR makes things clearer, which
> is why some don't think that it could be called an editorial change.  Now,
> there is also a good argument also that the DFSG should have been applied
> to documentation all along, but AJ thought he found a way to avoid that.
>
> Now, before you argue with me about the above paragraph, think about it as
Yeah, I did the thinking.  I couldn't help myself, though, hence the 
argument point above.  Although I left out many others because I'm 
assuming you actually know them.  (But if I'm wrong, do tell.)  That 
paragraph deliberately completely misses the points of the arguments for 
the  debian-legal interpretation of the previous Social Contract, right? 
 Diplomacy and saving face requires, in this case, pretending one's 
previous arguments never existed and never needed to?  That makes me 
deeply uncomfortable.

> a piece of diplomacy rather than as a purported theorem which it is your
> job to disprove.  The purpose of the diplomacy is to permit people like
> you and people like AJ to all save face and to continue to work together.
Of course that would be the goal.  :-)  I'm not sure what saving face 
would constitute for me, so I guess I don't get an equal share of this. 
 (Is a need for face-saving perhaps the 'looking good' psychological 
point?)

> You agree to disagree about the past, and you agree that, going forward,
> no one can deny that the DFSG applies to every byte Debian ships.

Actually, *nobody* agrees that it should, going forward!

See the discussion over license texts.  I guess people like me and 
people like AJ agree (maybe) that the long-term *goal* is that it will 
apply to the whole Debian system, but there are (endless!) arguments 
over how to get to that goal.  Of course, people like Marco D'Itri don't 
even agree on *that*.

And there's the often glossed-over distinction between the Debian system 
and 'what Debian ships'.  It seems to be the majority opinion that 
Debian should ship non-free, so...

Maybe you can come up with a better conclusion?  :-p

<snip lots of random stuff I wrote and decided not to send, as usual>