On Tuesday, Sep 2, 2003, at 22:56 US/Eastern, Richard Stallman wrote:
Branden is trying to make innocent things look bad; shame on him. Given the interview itself and the note I added later, both my views and the events involving GNU/LinEx are clear enough. So I won't answer his questions here.
That is unfortunate: I feel at least giving a general answer here would help clear up any misunderstandings.
The FSF would like to continue cooperating with Debian in such areas where Debian's and the FSF's policies agree.
The way things are now, it appears Debian's definition of free software will be a subset of what you and the FSF define to be free software. So, as far as I know, everything in main will be considered free by you, the FSF, and Debian. However, some things, like GFDL-licensed manuals will be excluded from main, and placed in non-free instead.
I'm pretty sure we don't have anything in main that you'd consider non-free; please correct me if I'm wrong.
Given this, do Debian's policies and the FSF's policies agree enough that the FSF is happy with Debian main? I understand that the FSF is not, and never will be, happy with non-free and quite possibly contrib as well.