Re: Hypocrisy of Debian (was: Sorry, no more RC bugs for non-free data in main ...)
Markus Laire writes:
>On 8/30/06, Roberto Gordo Saez <roberto.gordo@gmail.com> wrote:
>> If this is the common feeling here, I think I made a serious mistake
>> choosing Debian, because it does not follow my definition of freedom.
>> I would like to urge to change the Social Contract to be clarified
>> this in this case. I'm serious about that, it is no joke, because I
>> feel mislead. When reading it I was thinking I was doing the correct.
>> I was not sending those bugs because I am bad person, I was actually
>> thinking that was the common feeling and the correct think to do.
>>
>> Currently, under my point of view, the Social Contract and guidelines
>> do not reflect reality, they are just hypocrisy. This is a subjective
>> view, I know, but I think I'm not the only person in the world who may
>> understand it this way, so please, clarify.
>
>You are not the only one.
>
>I have somewhat similar feelings after I found out that the
>"cdrtools"-package[1] included in Debian isn't DFSG-free, but is still
>included in main.
>
>(Even worse, its license might even be illegal because it's GPLv2 +
>incombatible restrictions)
>
>This problem was mentioned in this list on _2004_ but cdrtools still
>hasn't been removed from Debian (see [2]). IMHO "hypocrisy" is perfect
>word to describe such behaviour.
>
>I used to believe that Debian only included legal, DFSG-free software
>in main, but "cdrtools" fiasco seems to prove that I was wrong.
Ever since the issue in cdrtools was found, the Debian maintainers
have been trying to convince the awkward upstream developer to fix his
licensing. These things take time. In the end, those same maintainers
have given up on that as a lost cause and instead have started work on
a free cdrtools fork that will ship in etch instead of cdrtools.
Please don't start throwing around insulting terms like "hypocrisy" -
they're not going to gain you any friends, nor are they going to
encourage people to devote their valuable time to Free Software
projects.
--
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. steve@einval.com
"I suspect most samba developers are already technically insane... Of
course, since many of them are Australians, you can't tell." -- Linus Torvalds
Reply to: