Re: The Spirit of Free Software, or The Reality

[Bas Wijnen <wijnen@debian.org>]

On Wed, Jul 15, 2015 at 07:56:42PM +0100, Ian Jackson wrote:
> Right.  I find it disappointing to discover that in Debian we have
> deliberately modified Iceweasl to make this problem worse, even if
> only in a modest way.
... 
> And one thing we could easily do (well, easily from a technical point
> of view, if we could agree to do it) would be to not download the
> icons.  AIUI downloading the icons was a change that was made in
> Debian for DFSG reasons.

I've seen Mike's mail, and agree that his solution is appropriate.  I'd like to
note my opinion on what seems to have happened here though (it may not actually
be what happened, but this is a theoretical argument, so that is irrelevant):

We found that some content was not DFSG free, and therefore we didn't want to
distribute it in Debian.  I don't see how anyone could think that "let the
program download the non-free material at first boot" is an appropriate
solution for anything in main.  The point of software in main is that our users
trust that we don't put non-free stuff on their machine.  It really doesn't
matter if that stuff comes from the archive or is auto-downloaded from
somewhere else.

I don't expect this to be controversial, but I wanted to mention it anyway,
because nobody did so far, and if there is no consensus about this, I think we
should have a discussion about it.

The "problem" that nobody mentioned it may be caused by the fact that nobody
really considers those icons non-free, and so having them on our users'
machines isn't a problem.  But then I agree with Ian and Mike, we should just
ship them in the package.

Thanks,
Bas