Re: jquery debate with upstream
Didier 'OdyX' Raboud writes ("Re: jquery debate with upstream"):
> I disagree: I don't think it's tolerable to ship a .exe freeware [0] in
> a source package in main, just because it happens to be redistributable;
> in my reading, considering that the "source package" _is_ a component of
> the Debian system, doing so violates at least SC§1 and DFSG§2. I don't
> think there should be a standards' difference between our source and
> binary packages.
I have a completely different approach to the DFSG. The DFSG is not
carefully drafted document and it doesn't stand up to detailed
legalistic interpretation. Rather, it is a statement of aims and
values.
When interpreting it, we need to primarily consider its underlying
purpose - and, ultimately, the underlying purpose of the whole
project.
That purpose is to improve the freedom of software users (and to an
extent developers) by providing an operating system which they can
(individually and collectively) examine, modify and share.
If an interpretation of the DFSG suggests that we should be doing work
which does not further those objectives, then I think that
interpretation is a misreading. Conversely, if an interpretation of
the DFSG suggests that we should tolerate a situation which undermines
the freedom of our users, then that would be a subversion of our
values.
No-one has come up with any practical benefit from the repacking of
source tarballs to remove nonfree files.
The requirement to be sure that these nonfree files aren't unwittingly
relied on by our build processes could be easily achieved by removing
them in clean targets, filtering in dpkg-source, or whatever.
If we are worried that users might be misled about the status of these
files, filtering them out in dpkg-source would suffice. The result
would be that the only people who saw them would be people who are
using our archive as a convenient location to fetch the upstream
tarball. I would argue that everyone's freedom is served, rather than
hindered, by having those people come to us for that (as it is in a
similar way for the nonfree archive sections).
Ian.
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