On Tue, 2004-06-01 at 14:22, Marek Habersack wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 01, 2004 at 02:03:28PM -0500, Joe Wreschnig scribbled:
> > If someone says "I intend to uphold the Debian Social Contract and abide
> > by the DFSG in my Debian work", and then refuses to remove non-free
> > stuff from main because there's no free alternative, I consider that a
> > serious loss of credibility; the person is not living up to what they
> > promised to do.
> Joe, get a grip. Face the facts - the driver was removed _despite_ the fact
> that there was a patch that was removing the "non-free" part of the driver.
> That's totally wrong _and_ it breaks the SC.
I mostly agree. It is not "totally wrong"; totally wrong would be
leaving the driver, complete with non-free undistributable firmware in
main forever. But it is far from an idea solution.
> And stop accusing me when you
> have no basis for the accusations, it is becoming annoying.
You said that people who remove stuff from Debian when no free
alternatives exist are unreliable. The contrapositive of that is,
reliable people do not remove non-free stuff from Debian.
That's clearly bullshit. Reliable people do what they agreed to do, one
of which (in the case of Debian) is to only upload stuff that meets the
DFSG to main.
You also said that you would not object to someone including e.g.
AutoCAD in Debian if we got permission. You didn't qualify this with
"and if the DFSG was modified". You even went so far as to again call
those who would oppose this unreliable. Now, I don't consider myself
unreliable, but I sure as hell don't want to see an enormous piece of
non-free software (in *every* sense of the word) in Debian.
I didn't promise Debian would remain 100% free software, except for
programs that someone really really wants.
> > But realize that by this logic ("just data"), I can upload any m68k
> > program to the x86 archive, because it's not really software. Does that
> > make sense?
> You're twisting the logic. m68k program can be executed on the m68k version
> of the Debian system (even on the x86 one, by using an emulator), the
> firmware cannot be executed on any Debian system, it is relevant only to the
> hardware in question and it is treated (even stored) as data on that Debian
> system. You can twist the logic all you want, though. By that token, I
> suppose you will say that a word document is a "proprietary software", not
> "just data" since it can contain, gross, VB code. Go figure.
This debate has happened dozens of times before over the past few years.
I have no wish to have it again. Please go read the -legal archives, and
try to rebut the points there.
--
Joe Wreschnig <piman@debian.org>
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