Re: Regarding BitKeeper and its price list
On Tue, Oct 08, 2002 at 07:26:10PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
JG>>> Debian is now involved in this dispute, and I think that is
JG>>> entirely inappropriate.
JC>> I don't think it's at all inappropriate. What I do think is
JC>> inappropriate is that Debian characteristically DOES NOTHING when
JC>> these kinds of events present themselves. What exactly does this
JC>> project stand for anyway?
AT> ``The Debian Project is an association of individuals who have made
AT> common cause to create a free operating system.''
<...>
AT> It's a good property for Debian to be somewhere you can go to just
AT> hack on something cool, without having to be worried about the
AT> latest scandal that's rocking the free world.
English is not my mother tongue, but in my humble opinion the word
`free' in the sentense you quoted implies something bigger than `just
hack on something cool', it means `free as in freedom', and freedom is
impossible without politics.
AT> If you want to do the whole political furour thing, they're plenty
AT> of organisations to do it via: the FSF, the EFF, SPI, OSI, LI, your
AT> local LUG, and so on.
I don't think politics can really be delegated to some organisation and
then successfully forgotten about. Organizations can only serve as focal
points of the political activity, but it is personal responsibility of
each individual developer to get involved with politics and to attract
attention of other people who are unaware of this responsibility.
And since Debian is about freedom, we Debian developers and users are
supposed to be interested in freedom, therefore we must get actively
involved with politics; since Debian is about software, our means of
direct action against oppression can be free software---not just any
free software, but software that encourages and protects freedom, such
as FreeNet, GnuPG, F-CPU, and so on.
--
Dmitry Borodaenko
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