Re: An ammendment (Re: Formal CFV: General Resolution to Abolish Non-Free)
On Sat, Jun 17, 2000 at 11:07:46PM +1000, Hamish Moffatt wrote:
> As I said above, "We will be guided by the needs of our users,"
> and our users have indicated that they still need non-free.
> So we need to keep maintaining it.
I thought we were over this little misunderstanding, at least nobody
opposed to my email
Subject: Debian is about providing the best free operating system
Message-ID: <[🔎] 20000611153147.B291@ulysses.dhis.net>
You can't take the sentence "We will be guided by the needs of our users"
out of context and generalize it in an arbitrary measure. Not everything
our users want is within scope of Debian (some users might want more
money, should we be responsible to collect money for them?).
No, the scope of point 4 in the social contract is *free software*,
and so the correct interpretation of the social contract, point 4, is,
we will be guided by the needs of our users with regards to the creation
of a free software distribution.
Every other interpretation is not supported by the wording in the social
contract and would open it to arbitrary conclusions (whatever some user
[or the majority] wants, must be done). Also, one should wonder why it
was felt necessary to include point 5 to the social contract if the
distribution of non-free software by Debian was considered to be a
logical conclusion from the other points.
Don't get me wrong. You can still believe that Debian should distribute
non-free software. But it is not a contradiction to support the social
contract points 1 to 4 while being in favour of the GR.
Thanks,
Marcus
--
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