On Fri, Jul 04, 2003 at 03:53:55AM +0800, Cameron Patrick wrote: > On Thu, Jul 03, 2003 at 02:34:56PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote: > > | The Debian Social Contract says "Debian Will Remain 100% Free Software". > | If there are things "in Debian" that are "not free" or "not software", > | then we may be violation of our guiding principles. > > The anarchism package is an excellent example of a package in Debian > main that, although DFSG-free, is neither software nor software > documentation. And I wouldn't lose any sleep if it were yanked from the Project. However, as others have pointed out, a consistently applied policy of removing non-documentation and non-software from Debian would take out the text of the King James Bible, the Linux Gazette packages, and anything that is neither human-readable nor executable, like sound files, icons, "wallpaper" for desktop environments, and so forth. Because it doesn't seem fruitful to tumble down that slippery slope, and while the packaging of Linux Gazette, the King James Bible, and the stuff in the anarchism package may conceivably be an abuse of the Debian OS to some people, these packages do (AFAIK) meet our licensing requirements for software. They therefore do not require us to compromise our principled dedication to freedom. (They might, on the other hand, compromise our principled decision to produce an operating system. At the same time, Microsoft has worked long and hard to persuade people that basically anything that comes off the disk platters in your computer is or can be "part of the OS". Advocates of the non-free RFCs being in main might share this view.) -- G. Branden Robinson | Never attribute to malice that Debian GNU/Linux | which can be adequately explained branden@debian.org | by stupidity. http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
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