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Re: Social Contract GR's Affect on sarge



On Mon, Apr 26, 2004 at 11:15:59AM +0200, Andreas Barth wrote:
> * Anthony Towns (aj@azure.humbug.org.au) [040426 07:10]:
> > 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.
> I can remember that the title was "editorial changes", and I can't
> understand it how this can change the importance of the sections.

The title isn't the change, the contents of the GR is. The proposers
believed the changes were editorial, and that my and others'
interpretation was wrong, and sought to clarify the document so that
this was unambiguously the case.

> Furthermore, the exceptions till now was not due to the fact that we
> don't require documentation to be free (quite contrary, there was a
> consensus on d-legal about GFDL not free), but due to the fact that we
> want to have enough time to come up with a proper solution.

No, the exception is _entirely_ due to the fact that we don't require
documentation, data, or firmware to be free. And debian-legal is not a
delegated body, and is unable to make decisions of their own that have
any relevance to Debian -- those decisions are made by the DPL, and the
appointed delegates in charge of handling the archive.

> > At the rate we're currently going, I don't really expect to be able to
> > achieve this this year.
> This means that we continue to deliver woody, which has more or less
> exactly the same defects. 

An argument could well be made that we should drop existing releases
that violate the social contract.

> If you really require a GR to prevent this,
> this could happen - but it costs us a lot of time that I'd rather see
> put into fixing bugs.

I'm not willing to violate the social contract we provide to our
users. I'm happy if there's some other way of reading the new social
contract that doesn't mean we should disregard our users' interests,
but I can't see one, and I don't think that it'd be appropriate for me
to make one up. If there isn't another reading, though, and we're just
going to choose to ignore it in spite of what it clearly requires, well,
that's not something I can support at all.

On Mon, Apr 26, 2004 at 11:46:43AM +0200, Martin Schulze wrote:
> Well, the changes were editorial to our understanding of the social
> contract with regards to freeness of data, especially since this
> was discussed over and over on debian-legal before.
> 
> Speaking of the GFDL, only those documents released under the GNU FDL
> are non-free that make use of invariant sections for anything else
> than its license, right?

I believe various folks have quibbles with other sections of the GFDL too;
such as the inability to place GFDL'ed docs under DMCA-ish "technological
protection measures" (which can variously be interpreted as DVD region
coding or crypto).

Cheers,
aj

-- 
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
Don't assume I speak for anyone but myself. GPG signed mail preferred.

Protect Open Source in Australia from over-reaching changes to IP law
http://www.petitiononline.com/auftaip/ & http://www.linux.org.au/fta/



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