Re: Mass bug filing: Cryptographic protection against modification
Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
> But thats rather beside the point. The point is that not 100% of
> Debian is free and never will be.
Perhaps. In that case, it's probably also true that Debian was never 100%
Free Software. (Exception: if you have a definition of Debian which
includes some programs in main, but not anywhere near everything in main.
This is a hard definition to use though.)
> Some things have to be
> excluded.
Perhaps true.
>Till the SC change non programms were excluded.
Really? I don't think so.
Debian-legal argued for years about whether that was the case. (And before
that, people argued about it on other Debian lists.) Debian-legal asked
many people for reasons either way. Someone read the Social Contract
carefully and realized that it simply couldn't allow non-free non-software,
if you read its literal meaning. Someone else contacted Bruce Perens to
see if this was a mistake in writing, and found that it wasn't.
Then there was the issue of what it *should* say. Various people argued
convincingly that the same freedoms were valuable for X that were valuable
for programs (for nearly every X which was brought up). The one exception
most people could agree on was legal texts which are distributed as a
condition of distribution, so after discussion this was accepted.
At this point debian-legal concluded that there never had been an exception
for non-software: there was no good justification for it, it was contrary
to the text, and it was contrary to original intent.
AJ said that the discussion on debian-legal was not sufficient and that this
had to be discussed in a larger forum. It *was* subsequently discussed in
the same level of detail on debian-devel, and yet more people ended up
coming to the same conclusions.
Then, even later, the clarifications codifying this finally went to
debian-vote and were passed. At this point, AJ declared that the passage
of the GR (not the general opinion of the vast majority of people who'd
bothered to discuss the topic, but the GR) would delay the release of sarge
-- and a bunch of people who hadn't been paying attention suddenly jumped
in, making the same claims which had already been discussed very carefully
for years. Perhaps some of them will actually listen to the arguments of
the people who did discuss it for years, but mostly I'm seeing stuff which
indicates that people just haven't heard and/or listened to the arguments.
It's really very frustrating.
--
There are none so blind as those who will not see.
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