Re: Amendment of Proposal - Deferment of Changes from GR 2004-003
Colin,
On Wed, Apr 28, 2004 at 04:59:00PM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> While I would certainly prefer this to "further discussion", I would
> like to propose the following amendment. (Alert eyes will note that it's
> Option C from Jeroen's post yesterday; I drafted the text that forms the
> basis of that Option anyway. I talked to Jeroen, who says he's currently
> busy with real-life tasks.)
>
> Points 1. and 2. above are removed and replaced with:
>
> 1. that the following text be appended to the first clause of the
> Social Contract:
>
> We apologize that the current state of some of our documentation and
> kernel drivers with binary-only firmware does not live up to this
> part of our Social Contract. While Sarge will not meet this standard
> in those areas, we promise to rectify this in the following release.
>
> The first clause of the Social Contract as amended will read as
> follows:
>
> 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.
>
> We apologize that the current state of some of our documentation and
> kernel drivers does not live up to this part of our Social Contract.
> While Debian 3.1 (codenamed sarge) will not meet this standard in
> those areas, we promise to rectify this in the next full release.
Well, first off: Your appended text and the revised first clause don't
match identically. (binary-only firmware is only in the former, 3.1
(codenamed sarge) only in the latter, for example).
But more to the point: While I see that your amendment has its merits,
I'm a bit nervous about changing the actual text of the SC *now* and,
obviously, again after Sarge releases (or do we keep it until sarge+1 is
out? Or forever?). I would consider the text rather ugly and a
historical cludge at that point and voting again next month (haha) to
revert it would be tiresome.
Now, in real-world politics, laws usually have a date when they are
placed into action a certain time after they've been voted on. Further,
laws that change how things are being implemented (see, e.g. exhaust
norms for new cars in California) are usually granted quite a while
(sometimes, years) until they become binding.
Thus, I would prefer a more general GR which states roughly the
following:
"Changes to the Social Contract become binding for the release after the
one currently being worked on and are not applicable to already released
versions of Debian. However, the developers are being urged to implement
these changes in the currently developed release, if possible."
We should add some syntactic sugar to make it retroactively applicable
to the last GR, of course.
Michael
PS: In any event, I'd appreciate it if AJ would speak up and tell us the
preferred way he would like us to deal with this situation. I know
'Three's a charm' but I'd rather not apply this to GR's changing the SC.
--
Michael Banck
Debian Developer
mbanck@debian.org
http://www.advogato.org/person/mbanck/diary.html
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