Re: Proposed solution to free/non-free Debate -- Please Read!
> Your're right. A lot of people don't understand the Debian non-free
> system.
i agree. we need some text, what we are doing, why we are doing, and
what "non-free", "contrib" and "dfsg" means.
something like a long version of :
(if other people share my view, maybe we can enhance this text and put
it in the web somewhere ? i wrote something like this several times to
explain things)
---
about debian, free software, copyright, non-free and contrib
there are several hundred different software licences out there,
nobody knows them all.
there was no ruling, when a software is free, and when not.
the basic principles of free software are :
- the right to help yourself
- the right to help others
(more informations are available at www.fsf.org/philosophy/).
but even with guidlines like this, it was not easy to decide if some
feature of a licence makes a software free or not-free. looking through
many licences we builded a list of "do" and "don't" items, sometime we
needed __long_- discussions to decide free or not free.
but free software has also a second aspect : good behaviour.
some programs require you to list the copyright and author, or similiar
things. people have invested much time in writing their programs, and
they give them to your for free. we have a large respect for their work,
so we not only meet their requirements, we also do these things if not
required :
we give credits who wrote the software and copy the licence. we write
down where we got the file. we mark our changes, make the original
source and our changes available to everyone. and more.
to show both aspects, we wrote a document called "debian's social
contract with the free software community". this documents shows what we
are doing to fullfill the requirement of free software authors and the
additional things we do to show our respect for them.
and it also lists our checklist for free software, called "debian free
software guidelines". we use this checklist to seperate software into
free and non-free stuff.
the word "non-free" isn't 100% correct : what we want to say with this
is : this software doesn't meet our requirements. we recommend everybody
to read the licence of such a program himself, and decide himself
whether he/she wants to use the program.
we only support free software, but we make also package non-free
software, make it available via our ftp server, handle it in our bug
report system, make it fit into debian.
debian gnu/linux is a free distributions, and will always only exist of
free software. non-free software can never be part of it, and it only
has the status of an optional addon.
and you might encounter the situation of a free software, that will only
run if you also have a non-free software. we add such packages to our
contrib distribution. like non-free software these packages are not part
of our distribution, but they are available via our ftp tree, etc...
if a package doesn't fit into debian, or is very buggy, or somehow
broken, not longer maintained, we remove it from debian, but place it
in contrib. if it gets to buggy, it is removed.
i hope, that this test might help a bit to understand us.
andreas
debian developer
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