Re: more evil firmwares found
Hamish Moffatt wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 12, 2004 at 08:59:31PM -0400, Nathanael Nerode wrote:
>> I strongly disagree with the idea that Debian should just contain
>> non-free "firmware" software for the indefinite future.
>>
>> (Of course, sarge should have a warning label: "This release of Debian is
>> known to be full of non-free software. Wait for the next release if you
>> want a release which we tried to make 100% Free Software." But given
>> that hypocrisy about this appears to be alive and well in the Debian
>> Project, I don't expect anyone will agree to attach such a warning.)
>
> Are you being deliberately inflammatory? Is this a troll?
Maybe just a little. Really, though, the widespread use of the sarge-ignore
tag for long periods speaks for itself.
> I don't think anyone has proposed ignore the issue indefinitely.
Yessss, they have. Marco D'Itri proposed that, on the grounds that
peripheral software somehow "didn't count". For the GFDL issue, many
people proposed it, on the grounds that documentation somehow "didn't
count".
> It has been proposed that we ignore it for now on the grounds that it's
> both hard to fix
Which claim I disagree with. :-P It's hard to fix *while* supporting
various random pieces of hardware, which is something slightly different.
> and less significant than the GFDL issue, which we're
> also ignoring for sarge.
What I was commenting on was, in fact, the GFDL issue, which has been
ignored for an *ample* period of time.
Speaking of which, supposedly the committee to discuss GFDL issues with the
FSF was going to have done something by about now. Perhaps we can expect
an announcement this week? (I'm not expecting anything, of course. :-P )
<snip>
> I think it's a bit unfair to say we haven't tried to make sarge 100%
> free. Some problems just can't be solved in a reasonable timeframe. If
> you want to delay the release for another year or more we could solve
> it, I'm sure. I don't see how that serves our users in any way.
>
> As always if we force our users to use other distributions (the ones
> that don't really care about free software) we lose the opportunity to
> preach to them later about the advantages of free software.
"As always, if we are honest, we lose the opportunity to preach to people
about honesty later." This is not an argument I find convincing.
> Speaking of hypocrisy, you don't appear to be either a developer
> OR in the non-free queue. What am I missing?
I haven't got my GPG key signed yet, and the instructions say not to even
bother to apply until you have. I only managed to get GPG working a month
or two ago.
Anyway, you don't need to be a developer to read the Social Contract and
expect that it means what it says. :-P
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