Let's try again with a cooler head... On 20030429T140523-0700, Alex Romosan wrote: > here it is what anthony towns said on tue, 29 apr 2003 15:47:51 +1000 > > No, it's not. Our raison d'etre is documented in the Debian > Manifesto, distributed in the doc-debian package. Or it's the Debian > Constitution, the Debian Social Contract, or the Debian Free > Software Guidelines distributed in the same package. If you look at > the Debian History package, you'll find the statement that `The > Debian Project was officially founded by Ian Murdock on August 16th, > 1993.', which stands in interesting contrast to WHY-FREE's > `Copyright 1994 Richard Stallman'. > > which, at least to me, seems to imply that debian and its lofty ideals > preceded the WHY-FREE manifesto by at least a year. Well, taken literally that is true. Debian did precede WHY-FREE. I would understand your position a little more if you defended the GNU manifesto and not WHY-FREE which is a newer creation. I would still disagree with you, but I'd understand your position better. > i don't think it was either, since at the very beginning > (and i've been using debian since early in 1995) there was no > obsession with software purity. I have observed that the awareness within Debian and in the free software community general of issues surrounding free software has been gradually increasing. This is not a Debian-only trend. The community at large has realized that what they thought to be okay isn't okay after all (granted, there are also a lot of people who don't care and are hostile to any such moves, but this seems to coincide with the rather large set of people who really don't give a damn about doing the right thing, either legally or morally). A famous example is the BSD advertising clause. > this came about in 1997 and culminated with the social contract > written by bruce perens (who later on left the project when it looked > like, and it was, hijacked by the completely free-software zealots) Debian is not even now run completely by free software "zealots". > now a different bunch of zealots > are trying to hijack the project once again attempting to extend the > definition of software Again, this is a matter of realizing and fixing past mistakes. I myself have used the documentation is not software argument - successfully - to get a package past ftpmaster. I now believe that I was mistaken then. As I said, in the software engineering discipline, software has for a long time stood for a lot more than just the code. > i think the debian project as a whole needs to reach a consensus > before anybody starts removing files from packages because the said > files don't meet their purity standards. this is not happening. you > have taken upon yourselves to extend the definition of software, purge > the distribution of what you deem impure, and in general ignore any > opinions that don't agree with yours. I still find this very insulting and very unfounded. I demand you support these accusations with hard evidence. > it is because of zealots like you every revolution fails in the end. So it is wrong for me to defend what I believe is right? -- %%% Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho % gaia@iki.fi % http://www.iki.fi/gaia/ %%%
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