Re: Social Contract GR's effect on sarge
Anthony Towns wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 25, 2004 at 07:28:11PM -0500, Debian Project Secretary wrote:
>> At this point, with 244 ballots resulting in 216 votes from
>> 214 developers,
Um, how did that work? 216 votes from 214 developers?!?
> "Choice 1: Change the Social Contract [3:1 majority
>> needed]" has carried the day., with a 4.462:1 majority, well over the
>> 3:1 needed.
>
> The Social Contract now states:
>
> ] 1. Debian will remain 100% free
> ]
> ] We provide the guidelines that we use to determine if a work is "free"
> ] in the document entitled "The Debian Free Software Guidelines". We
> ] promise that the Debian system and all its components will be free
> ] according to these guidelines. We will support people who create or
> ] use both free and non-free works on Debian. We will never make the
> ] system require the use of a non-free component.
>
> As this is no longer limited to "software", and as this decision was
> made by developers after and during discussion of how we should consider
> non-software content such as documentation and firmware, I don't believe
> I can justify the policy decisions to exempt documentation, firmware,
> or content any longer, as the Social Contract has been amended to cover
> all these areas.
>
> As such, I can see no way to release sarge without having all these
> things removed from the Debian system -- ie main.
>
> This will result in the following problems:
>
> * important packages such as glibc will have no documentation
Ay-yup. And GCC too, since I've only barely begun to work on that.
You know, there was this "committee" which was supposed to meet with the FSF
about the GFDL problems, and report back in early April? What ever
happened to them? You don't think the FSF could be *stalling*, do you?
> * many pieces of hardware will not be supported by the Debian system
> itself
>
> * firmware will need to be split out of the kernel into userspace
> in all cases
Not quite correct; we have source for some firmware. :-) Only sourceless
firmware needs to be split out.
> * firmware will need to be packaged separately from the
> kernel/X in all cases
Again, we have source for some firmware. :-)
> * debian-installer will need to be rewritten to support obtaining
> non-free firmware but not other non-free packages
>
> * firmware for drivers needed for booting (network cards
> particularly) will need to be made available as udebs in
> non-free, and separate non-free d-i images will need to be
> made for people relying on that firmware
Ay-yup. This should not be terribly difficult, if anyone other than me
actually bothers to work on it.
> At the rate we're currently going, I don't really expect to be able to
> achieve this this year.
Particularly replacing the documentation, which is *huge*. Releasing sarge
with a documentation shortage is probably the only option. The firmware
is, frankly, less of an issue than it looks at first glance.
--
There are none so blind as those who will not see.
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