[John: Not only did you ignore my Mail-Followup-To header, to which I drew your attention in the very first line of my reply, but you mailed me a private copy of your message. Please review the Debian Mailing List Code of Conduct. Followups set, AGAIN.] On Fri, Aug 22, 2003 at 03:34:06PM -0500, John Goerzen wrote: > On Fri, Aug 22, 2003 at 12:06:39PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote: > > The Social Contract[1] says that Debian "will remain 100% Free > > Software", and that the Debian Free Software Guidelines shall be a tool > > that we use to for determining whether something in the Debian > > distribution is Free Software or not. Debian Developers have pledged to > > The corrolary is that 0% of Debian is non-free software. Documentation is > not software at all. I see you have not taken my advice to read the archives of debian-legal. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2001/debian-legal-200112/msg00027.html "The Social Contract does not say: Debian Will Remain 100% Free Software and Some Other Things That Aren't Software But Which Are Also Free But Meet a Different Definition Of Free Than That Which Applies to Software, Plus Some Other Stuff That Isn't Free By Any Stretch Of The Imagination But Which We Thought Would Be Nice To Have." > The mere fact that the social contract says that 100% of Debian is Free > Software does not magically make everything that is part of Debian > "software". Just saying something is so is begging the question, and I am > getting tired of that game. I'm getting tired of the game that interprets: "This food product is 100% fat free." as: "The stuff that isn't fat in this food product is 100% fat-free, but the non-fat-free stuff might have fat in it." I'm also getting tired of having words put in my mouth. I have at no time (and neither has any other opponent of different standards of freedom for documentation within the Debian Project, to my knowledge), asserted that "documentation *IS* software". Please cease these fallacious straw man attacks. I'm also getting tired of you not familiarizing yourself with the voluminous past discussions of this subject. > If you take Clause 1 of the Social Contract to literally mean that Debian > contains nothing save software that is free, then that clause has never been > true since it was introduced, since we have always contained many > non-software items (documentation, bibles, Linux Gazette issues, RFCs, > graphics, wallpapers, sounds, etc.) http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2001/debian-legal-200112/msg00023.html "If it's not *Software* then either, 1) We must treat it as such, or; 2) We have no mandate to deal with it at all." Wow, look at that. December 2001. I wonder if people have talked about these issues while you weren't paying attention? > If you take Clause 1 of the Social Contract to mean that all software in > Debian is free, it makes a lot of sense to me, and does not itself remove > the moral requirement that documentation and other files are free as well. Everything we possibly can ensure to be Free in Debian must be Free. That means everything except legal notices (copyright notices, license terms, warranty disclaimers, and the like). We could do without that stuff as well, except we'd either expose ourselves to legal liability, or be left only with public domain materials. Either would mean there wouldn't be a Debian Project for much longer. I guess at this point you can, if you like, argue that losing the GNU Emacs Manual, with its inseparable GNU Manifesto, would deal the Project an equally fatal blow. > Not that I see that this whole discussion bears any relevance to the > DFSG/GFDL discussion. It's a discussion of the Social Contract, for which the correct forum is debian-project. This is not a technical discussion. Please stop grandstanding on debian-devel. -- G. Branden Robinson | It was a typical net.exercise -- a Debian GNU/Linux | screaming mob pounding on a greasy branden@debian.org | spot on the pavement, where used to http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | lie the carcass of a dead horse.
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