Re: Hypocrisy of Debian (was: Sorry, no more RC bugs for non-free data in main ...)
On 8/31/06, Steve McIntyre <steve@einval.com> wrote:
Markus Laire writes:
>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)
I should've added 'IMHO' to that sentence. I didn't check if this
opinion is/was shared by others.
>
>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.
So they've been doing this for 2 years, and have included
non-DFSG-free cdrtools in main while doing so? They even shipped Sarge
with this known non-DFSG-free package in main?
IMHO cdrtools should've been removed from main while this process was underway.
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.
Do you have any link/source to support the claim that this will be
fixed for etch?
I havn't found any such information. Is there a public
source-code-repository for this fork?
(I know that forking was mentioned at [1] but I havn't seen anything
more substantial)
[1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=377109
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.
If my comments about "hypocrisy" are true, then I don't care about
"friends" whom I might lost because of speaking the truth. Then it
would also be appropriate for people to be discouraged from devoting
their valuable time to "hypocritical" Free Software projects.
If I was wrong, then I can only apologize and try to be more carefull
in the future.
ps. I wasn't aware that cdrtools has been requested to be removed
because there was no mention of it at cdrtools-bugs[2] and I didn't
know to check the cdrtools-overview[3].
[2] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?src=cdrtools
[3] http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/cdrtools.html
--
Markus Laire
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