Re: Debian Weekly News - August 19th, 2003
On Fri, Aug 22, 2003 at 12:06:39PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 22, 2003 at 09:58:30AM +0200, Jérôme Marant wrote:
> > Branden's survey is misleading and assumes that documentation is
> > software. It is unfair and doesn't count.
>
> No, my survey is narrowly scoped.
>
> The Social Contract[1] says that Debian "will remain 100% Free
> Software", and that the Debian Free Software Guidelines shall be a tool
> that we use to for determining whether something in the Debian
> distribution is Free Software or not. Debian Developers have pledged to
The corrolary is that 0% of Debian is non-free software. Documentation is
not software at all.
The mere fact that the social contract says that 100% of Debian is Free
Software does not magically make everything that is part of Debian
"software". Just saying something is so is begging the question, and I am
getting tired of that game.
> act to uphold the Social Contract and DFSG. If you want to change them,
> you know the process. But do not attempt to subvert them by attempting
> to persuade people that clause 1 of the Social Contract says things it
> obviously does not.
If you take Clause 1 of the Social Contract to literally mean that Debian
contains nothing save software that is free, then that clause has never been
true since it was introduced, since we have always contained many
non-software items (documentation, bibles, Linux Gazette issues, RFCs,
graphics, wallpapers, sounds, etc.)
If you take Clause 1 of the Social Contract to mean that all software in
Debian is free, it makes a lot of sense to me, and does not itself remove
the moral requirement that documentation and other files are free as well.
Not that I see that this whole discussion bears any relevance to the
DFSG/GFDL discussion.
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