Re: The new Social Contract and releasing Sarge
On Thu, Apr 29, 2004 at 11:46:06AM +0100, Mark Brown wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 28, 2004 at 11:28:34PM -0600, Jamin W. Collins wrote:
>
> > Letting these items sit without corrective action being
> > taken/started for 200+ days hoping that something would be done
> > externally directly lead to part of the situation we now find
> > ourselves in (I am in no way saying this was the intent of the
> > recent GR). Had work been done on these packages from the
> > beginning, regardless of the sarge-ignore tags, we wouldn't be in
> > such a bind.
>
> For those packages where the problem is the GFDL (which from what I
> gather seems to be a reasonable chink of them) I'd say that the work
> Mako and others are doing with the FSF is constructive work on
> resolving the issue. You may question the results but I don't think
> it's fair to say the problem is being completely ignored.
Unless the authors of these packages were directly involved in the
attempts to correct these issues, yes they were being ignored. Granted
the talks with the FSF _may_ result in a change to the GFDL that makes
it DFSG free. However, in the meantime the problem continues to exist
in our archives. The developers could have made the necessary changes
to their package (construction or location) to resolve the problem and
then reverted those changes later. Would this have required time, sure.
Did they have this time, sure.
> > Was this not a problem that would have needed to be addressed after
> > the sarge release anyway? If so, why postpone it? In the hopes
> > sarge was released soon? That shouldn't have stopped the
> > developer's from working to correct their packages in the meantime.
>
> There's also the usefulness issue to consider
Only so far as we do not violate any of our guiding documents. There
are many useful items that we can not distribute for one reason or
another.
> clearly, the best way out of this problem is to get all the things we
> want to release licensed under a free license but that's obviously not
> the case at present.
I agree.
> Given that situation deciding to keep the documentation for the time
> being in the hope that a more constructive solution can be found seems
> like a perfectly sensible situation.
Don't agree with this. Work should have been done to correct the
packages in the interrum.
--
Jamin W. Collins
"Never underestimate the power of very stupid people in large groups."
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
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