Re: I am ANGRY with Debian.
On Thu, 31 May 2007 19:59:27 +0100, Nic James Ferrier
<nferrier@tapsellferrier.co.uk> said:
> My name is Nic Ferrier. I am really ANGRY at Debian. After 10 years
> of being a dedicated Debian user I have reached the point at which I
> am so angry with what is being done that I want to stop using it. I
> will start to look for viable alternatives to Debian.
Good luck with your software choices elsewhere. I suggest you
look at the GNU web site to see what OS they recommend; it may be more
to your liking, since you consider the GFDL licensed software to be
free.
> It is just so ludicrous. It's all I can do to not swear in great big
> capital letters at the people who made this decision.
Swearing at people who volunteer to bring you something you can
use for free seems fairly counter productive.
Who is John Galt?
> Or are they going to accept that doing this is pretty stupid and
> driving people away and that another way should be found than the
> current package vandalism.
I don't think the decision was stupid. We spent 4 years trying
to talk a compromise with the FSF. If people do not care about Debian
caring for software freedom (and, you know, defining what we call
freedom), then people are free to go elsewhere. There is no
coercion. One size does not fit all.
> In this instance, Debian the community of developers and package
> maintainers, has made a politicial decision and then taken a mandate
> for action from that which overreaches what should have been done.
Actually, some of us wanted _any_ GFDL'd docs thrown out of
Debian, but the compromise view prevailed.
> As far as I can see, only a third of the electorate voted. And Debian
> has a very limited electorate; I have been using Debian for 10 years;
> I have contributed help and user conversions - but I don't get a vote.
The people responsible for a subset of Debian (i.e., one or more
packages that make debian) get to vote. This is a variant of those who
do, decide.
> What I'm saying is that care should have been taken with the
> decision. It was a sensitive issue and what is being done is not
> sensitive.
Debian has always been about freedom. I am not free to do things
to GFDL material which I may for other software in Debian -- so I am
not sure why people are surprised.
> And I think that is *exactly* like politics elsewhere. I am not
> surprised by that. But I am dissapointed and angry.
> It is also interesting that a good number of people have seen nothing
> wrong with the actions as they have been taken and I get taken to task
> for bringing it up. That looks a lot like normal politics to me.
Sounds more like a difference of opinion.
> An alternative action would have been to move bash-doc, emacs and
> other packages that are going to be altered by this decision to
> non-free rather than removing the documentation and leaving us with
> none.
And that has been done, in a number of cases. (I did that with
make-doc-non-dfsg). But this is a group of volunteers. Some people
did not feel like working on non-free packages. You can't force
'em. Surely, if this irritates so many, someone will come in to scratch
their itch and package the docs for Debian again.
In the meanwhile, one hopes upstream reverts to a sane license.
manoj
--
I used to be an agnostic, but now I'm not so sure.
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@acm.org> <http://www.golden-gryphon.com/>
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