On Sunday, Aug 31, 2003, at 07:13 US/Eastern, Tore Anderson wrote:
I don't like the fact that these seem to be (randomly) scattered over main and contrib. Although the installer packages themselves certainly are Free, I feel the social contract is being violated when I have main and contrib in my sources.list file, but after having completed the installation of a package from these sections, non-free software is installed on my system.
"We acknowledge that some of our users require the use of programs that don't conform to the Debian Free Software Guidelines. We have created "contrib" and "non-free" areas in our FTP archive for this software. The software in these directories is not part of the Debian system, although it has been configured for use with Debian."
Clearly, we have not violated the Social Contract: Contrib does not, per the social contract, need to follow the DFSG (policy imposes greater requirements, which is fine).
If you tell the installer you don't want non-free software, it won't put contrib in your sources.list.
I think it is reasonable to require that installer packages inform the user they are about to install non-free software and give the user an opportunity to review the license of that software before proceeding, though.