On Fri, Nov 15, 2002 at 06:44:41PM +0100, Emile van Bergen wrote: > On Fri, Nov 15, 2002 at 10:05:03AM -0600, John Goerzen wrote: > > Then you would have us amend the Social Contract: > > > > 4. Our Priorities are Our Users and Free Software > > Not necessarily, it doesn't conflict with my interpretation of our goals > in any way; it represents it quite accurately. That seems demonstrably false. "serving the users is in the end the only goal" "even the Holy GNU General Public License (and the DFSG) is just a means to an end, which is to provide the user with good software" It seems that a more accurate expression of your interpretation of our goals would be: 4. Our Prorities are Our Users and Good Software or even 4. Our Priorities are Our Users You explicitly stated that Free Software is just a means to the end of serving our users. In that case Free Software is clearly subordinate to the needs of our users. If that is how you feel, you should propose an amendment to John's General Resolution stating this. If he rejects it and if your amended form of the GR acquires enough seconds, it will appear as an option on the ballot. > However, in the end, software is there only for the humans that use it. > Not the other way around. I do not see how the existing Social Contract places software before humans. It is humans that use Free Software. The freedoms that Free Software enables are human freedoms. The freedoms that non-free software inhibits are human freedoms. > I don't think that the Debian Project will automagically provide more > free software once we stop distributing a non-free repository alongside > Debian. That's a too easily assumed argument in this discussion. I haven't seen anyone make that assumption. Can you cite a message where a proponent of the GR has done so? > The end that /not/ removing non-free serves is that it provides users > with software that some Debian Developers and some users consider > important and free enough to use and support. This is consistent with your understanding of the Social Contract, but not consistent with what the Social Contract actually says, as far as I can see. According to the Social Contract, the only "free enough" is DFSG-free, and under your understanding we'd be better off if we struck ", but we will never make the system depend on an item of non-free software." from clause one of the Social Contract, among other edits. If it's important enough to our users and free "enough" to use and support, why *shouldn't* we let the system depend on it, if it makes technological sense to do so? > If it's useful enough even for some people to spend energy on, who are > we to say we aren't willing to lend our infrastructure to allow other > users to benefit from that effort, if we don't have to give up work on > truly free software to allow it to continue? Why not just put all the non-free software in main? > It's not like developers working on packages in non-free will suddenly > stop spending time on packages they use and need themselves and start > work on some other packages. Some may, others may not. Do you presume to know with certainty the mind of every Debian maintainer who packages non-free software? > Anybody who does plan to do so, should do so by his own choice, and > shouldn't need the removal of non-free. They should, but they may not, for they are inertial. At any rate, the distribution of non-free software is not essential to Debian's mission; clause 5 of the Social Contract was tacked on as a compromise measure. A review of the archives of debian-private for the months of June and July 1997 will make this clear. (Sven Rudolph proposed it, and Bruce Perens included the proposal in modified form. Back then we didn't have GR's, just the Project Leader's will, basically. Bruce's first several drafts of the Social Contract did not include clause 5 at all, but the first four clauses were clearly recongizable in the first draft relative to their final form.) > We're all grown ups, we can make our own decisions which software we'll > use. Then what is wrong with putting this GR to a vote, and deciding? > Of course we believe that people are better off with Free software, > but that only applies in general, not for each and every particular > situation. Then why don't we allow particular packages into Debian main as part of our official distribtion, as long as we can legally distribute them and they serve a valuable purpose in a specific situation? This sort of approach appears to have worked well for Red Hat. > I won't even spend a blink of an eye thinking if I should get > rid of daemontools or qmail on my system if Debian stops providing it > through non-free. John's proposed GR would not require that you do so. > I think that dhe Debian project benefits from non-free because Debian > plus non-free is more attractive to people than Debian sans non-free. I do not see attractiveness mentioned anywhere in the Social Contract. > Of course being attractive is not a goal in itself, but important to > realise our goal of serving our users (including ourselves) by giving > them Free Software. I don't understand; under our Social Contract, if it's Free it doesn't *have* to be attractive; we can ship it. So attractiveness must only matter for non-free software. > Because to realise that goal, we need developers, and to get developers, > we need enthusiast users, and to get enthusiasts we need newbies, and to > get newbies we need to provide enough value as a way to get involved > with GNU/Linux that people will consider Debian. The fact that Japanese > support for xpdf is available, good speech synthesis, DJB's stuff, all > helps in that. There are few oversights in the above argument. * Dropping these things from our mirror network won't stop them from being available, as long as someone wants to make them available. * Debian seems to have had little trouble attracting developers over the many years that we didn't have Japanese support for xpdf or good speech synthesis. DJB's stuff does appear to have been around forever, though, so one could argue that we might have been picking up developers who found Debian's distribution of qmail from our mirror network as *the* critical factor in leading them to use Debian, or volunteer to help develop it. * Even the presence of DJB's software appears to be of limited utility to us; even when people were furious with the ISC's handling of the recent bind 8 exploits, I saw several testimonials to the effect that they wouldn't switching to djbdns for technical reasons, quite apart from concerns about licensing. I therefore wonder just how "attractive" DJB's stuff really is. Of all the non-free software that Debian distributes, I hear the most complaints about his. * We seem to be attracting new developers faster than we can add them our rolls as it is; is it your contention that if we stop distributing non-free packages from our mirror network, that the new maintainer rolls will dry up? Worse still, will we hemmorhage away existing developers so severely that our very survival is threatened? * Is growth in and of itself a virtue, whether in number of packages, number of developers, or number of users? If so, how important is it? What other considerations should we be subordinating in favor of promoting growth? Perhaps we should drop our principled stance on Free Software, for as you eloquently point out, it is assuredly hamstringing us in some ways. There is much useful software that would be more readily accessible to our users if we'd just ship it as part of the OS. -- G. Branden Robinson | I had thought very carefully about Debian GNU/Linux | comitting hara-kiri over this, but branden@debian.org | I overslept this morning. http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | -- Toshio Yamaguchi
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