Zenaan Harkness wrote:
It was Donnie Barnes. You wrote something to me about Red Hat not having a social contract. But there was also a conversation I was having at about the same time with Eric Andersen, regarding what belonged in Debian and what did not. And to resolve that, I wrote the first draft of the Debian Social Contract and DFSG.Bruce, you have layn claim to authorship of the Debian Social Contract previously, can you please clarify your position wrt ean's comments below. Thanks Zenaan On Fri, 2004-03-12 at 12:21, Ean Schuessler wrote:The Social Contract itself is the result of a charged discussion that _I_ had at USENIX with Robert Young
Well, also compromise with people who felt that Debian would not be as useful without it. Remember that there was a lot _less_ Free Software back then. Times have changed a tremendous lot since then.Non-free and contrib crept in as a matter of convenience.
There is no question that Debian is huge and mature enough to split into a Pure Free Software project and a separate project for non-free. And that's what I think we should do.At the time the vast majority of people could not download something as big as Debian so their importance was discounted. Those times are passing and we need to come to terms with where we came from so that we can firmly perceive where we are headed.
Uh, why don't we just split the project into a free and non-free part, and let the two projects make their own policies. We can do this without getting people all inflamed by making reactionary speeches before it happens. That's just going to make the transition more difficult. This is simply a matter of "we've grown up now and this is the right thing to do".Debian is Free. Support does not mean distribution. If an organization or an author is not kind enough to
Thanks Bruce