Re: General Resolution: Removing non-free, Draft 2

[Peter Makholm <peter@makholm.net>]

John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> writes:

> A. That the Debian Social Contract with the Free Software Community be
> amended as follows:

I do not like this resolution.

For one thing, making it possible to change the Social contract is
effectivily making it means void. Next time a change will probally
means more support of non-free things and it will have this as
precedense that changes of the social contract is legal. In this way
no-one outside Debian can depend on that the social contract will
remain as supportive of the free software community as it is now.

That this proposal is in conflict with the present Social Contract
should be obvious. The question is the Constitution above the Social
Contract or is the Social Contract above the Constitution? I'm sure
this has been discussed but my memory doesn't serve me well and it
could have been before I became developer.

We don't support free software by denying that non-free software
exists. We're supporting free software by showing that free software
is better and more usable than non-free software in fair combat. The
point is that we should make it easy to use free software not hard to
use non-free software and by denying the existence of non-free
software we making it hard for people to start using free software.

Marrally I don't see any difference between complete packages and
installers. Can you explain the differeence to me?


Ok, lets do some package count:

makholm@auric:/org/ftp.debian.org/ftp/dists/potato/non-free/source$ zcat Sources.gz | grep "^Package" | wc -l
    237
makholm@auric:/org/ftp.debian.org/ftp/dists/potato/non-free/source$ zcat Sources.gz | grep "^Maintainer" | sort -u | wc -l
    126
makholm@auric:/org/ftp.debian.org/ftp/dists/potato/non-free/source$ 

We have at least 100 people thinking that some non-DFSG software is
worth supporting. Not that this is argumenting one way or another.

>   1. That text of Section 5 be modified to read: "We acknowledge that
[...]
>   such software itself, we have created areas in our archive for
>   packages that help install or otherwise requre this software.  The
                                            require

just so nobody just cut`n'pastes it in with spellingerrors.

-- 
Peter