Re: Recently released QPL
Joseph Carter wrote:
> > > He has already proposed on more than one occasion that Debian get rid of
> > > the nasty (in his mind) point on our social contract to support people
> > > who use non-free software and has taken steps to cause us to all but
> > > delete the contrib and non-free portions of our archive in potato. It's
> > > about time someone stood up and pushed for just a little bit of realism
> > > here.
> >
> > Cites, please. I have never seen him propose this, and I have seen
> > none of these steps. You are misrepresenting him.
>
> It was a mistake to bring this up here. My apologies, the cites would
> almost exclusively be references to -private messages, though the results
> of them have been discussed elsewhere.
You can send them privately, if you wish. I have a complete archive
of that list.
> I can immediately name two such "suggestions" which have been discussed
> on -devel after the original message on -private so I will cite them.
> The suggestion that Debian stop distributing contrib and non-free on our
> ftp sites or create a new site to distributed Debian without them was
> his.
He only ever suggested the second. He asked for a hostname under
which only free packages could be found.
> He's also the person who had the problem with the longstanding allowance
> of suggests into contrib/non-free for packages which he took as Debian's
> ringing endorsement of non-free software rather than the simple
> suggestion it was.
He only asked that the lack of a non-free package not be presented
as an error. He said he'd be happy if dselect would simply ignore
such suggests links if non-free packages are not available.
> (And yet his "suggestions" are just that, simple suggestions
> right---even though he holds over us that he'll tell people that
> we're NOT in fact a free distribution unless we do as he wishes..)
I heard he's already telling people that no Linux distribution is
entirely free. That's why I stopped calling it GNU/Linux. Then
again, I think I heard that from you. I'll ask him directly.
So far you haven't shown any of the things you claimed in that
paragraph at the top. Nothing about the social contract, and
no steps taken. I think you should investigate how many of your
views regarding RMS are based on things he actually said and did.
He's often misrepresented; everybody loves a strawman.
Richard Braakman
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