Re: Social Contract GR's Affect on sarge
Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> writes:
> Actually, this may be useful. If this inspires the pragmatists to go
> make a "Debian Useful" variant that actually has documentation,
> firmware, fonts, etc. then the fringe fanatics that want to spend all
> of their time arguing over the Social Contract can do that. This, of
> course, assumes that people worked on Debian because they were
> interested in technical excellence.
>
> If instead, it turns out there are significant numbers of people who
> believe their participation in Debian is really more about proving
> that they are Holier Than Stallman, those that *are* interested in
> making something useful for their users have their choice of either
> (a) trying to see if they have the votes to shut-out the fanatics, (b)
> try to build something useful that uses Debian as a base, and leaves
> the insanity behind, or (c) join the Fedora project, or some other
> distribution.
The issue is actually more complex because of the non-free section of
the distribution. The pragmatists will simply use that one. People
like me who suffer from a mild form of Free Software Extremism are
those who are losing most because they can no longer rely on the way
Debian applies the DFSG to decide which packages can go into main. It
looks as if they have to make their own decisions in the future.
The current issue is not the issue of main vs. non-free, but a
scrupulous Release Manager. (But I'm not saying it's his fault if his
principles prevent him from releasing sarge under the current
circumstances.)
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