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Re: Please let's not talk about "clouds"



On 2013-04-21 23:16, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
On 21/04/13 at 21:23 +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
On Sun, Apr 21, 2013 at 10:01:03PM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
One point that I think that is important to make, is that points of view diverge on the question of "software as a service", and that the answer is
external to the foundation principles of Debian.
FWIW, I disagree that the answer is external to the founding principles of Debian. In fact, I think this is one of the next big challenges ahead for both Debian and Free Software at large. As a project, we'll probably
need to take an official stance on this at some point.
In the past, Debian has taken official stances on philosophical issues
only when they had technical consequences (GFDL, firmwares), e.g. on
the content of the archives or packages.
Do you think that we should go past that and make more general
philosophical/political statements, even if they have no effect on our
archive?
What kind of issues do you see that could require a project-wide
position? (I see one so far: packages that are clients to non-free
online services)

I can see another that is related. The scenario is that, say, HP Cloud Services (my employer) were to put Debian images on their OpenStack cloud which is built on open source, but which does not have all of the code made available to users. The trademark policy is not clear on describing things which contain Debian itself. If HPCS adds a special super whiz-bang open source but HP cloud only thing to the images, its not clear that they can or cannot call that Debian still. It would be good for the project to make the policy on images clear at http://www.debian.org/trademark .


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