On Mon, Sep 08, 2003 at 10:53:56AM -0500, John Goerzen wrote: > Not entirely. My proposal to remove non-free from our archives and amend > the social contract to state that it will no longer be available on our FTP > servers is what is in the air. [s/state that it will no longer/no longer state that it will/, as you notetd.] > We can, without making any change to the social contract or requiring any > GR, create a separate /debian-non-free archive on our mirror system, and > change the base system to provide no reference to it. And likewise, we can amend the Social Contract to longer engrave in iron our commitment to continue distributing non-free software. In other words, we can make it no longer a violation of the Social Contract to stop providing FTP access to a non-free software archive, but continue to provide it for other reasons. That issue is more personally important to me. I want us to be able to evaluate the utility of non-free on purely pragmatic grounds, instead of locking ourselves via the Social Contract into distributing non-free via FTP. We could then either cut non-free loose as an ordinary operational decision, establish some sort of criteria under which it would be "automatically" dropped, or put non-free under the control of some delegate or committee. Essentially, divorcing non-free from the Social Contract gives us *more* freedom to deal with it as we wish, not less. -- G. Branden Robinson | To Republicans, limited government Debian GNU/Linux | means not assisting people they branden@debian.org | would sooner see shoveled into mass http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | graves. -- Kenneth R. Kahn
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