Le mercredi, 12 mars 2014, 12.58:51 Ian Jackson a écrit :
> 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.
My intent was not to draw a legalistic line, I was merely explaining
what my (current) interpretation of these aims and values are with
regards to shipping non-free binaries in source packages in main.
> 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.
SC§1 states that we want Debian to remain 100% free; the common
interpretation of that is that one can download anything from Debian
main and only get DFSG-free material; I think our sources are held to
the same expectation. In fact, we _are_ shipping source and binary
packages in the exact same way through our mirrors network.
Now, granted, making Debian 100% free is not improving the freedom of
software users if they don't use these non-free parts (and having them
in the source packages only is certainly a blocker), but I strongly feel
that weakening our promise to only address binary packages for the sake
of practicability is certainly not worth the practical benefit.
> No-one has come up with any practical benefit from the repacking of
> source tarballs to remove nonfree files.
There's no practical benefit, granted, but doing so is a service to our
users and a continued statement that we hold ourselves to high standards
with regards to software freedom.
> 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.
I think that, given proper tools, the explicit work of making sure that
some non-free files are not used in the build process is equivalent to
making sure they are not present in the source package.
> If we are worried that users might be misled about the status of these
> files, filtering them out in dpkg-source would suffice.
That would protect sources.debian.net from publishing these indeed. I
still disagree it's sufficient though.
> 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).
… besides main is not the non-free archive section.
At the risk of repeating myself: I value our promise that Debian will
remain 100% free and I want that promise to include our source archives
because access to sourcecode is what free software is all about. I'd be
saddened by a decision to exempt the source archives from that freeness
requirement.
Cheers,
OdyX
P.S. There's no need to CC me, as I can't CC you in return and am
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