Re: Honesty in Debian (was Re: Amendment to GR on GFDL, and the changes to the Social Contract
On Mon, Feb 13, 2006 at 09:22:07AM +0100, Sven Luther wrote:
> I want to remind you all, that previous to the two GRs which clarified the
> meaning of what we must consider free, we had a widely disputed GR on the fate
> of our non-free section, and we all voted to keep it, especially because there
> was non-free software (including firmware, documentation and whatever), which
> was non-free but useful to our users, and we decided to keep it accordying to
> our social contract which put our users and free software on equal level.
That's not correct. The project simply voted not to removed it at that
time, by defeating the GR. There was no affirmative vote to keep
non-free as far as I can remember. The amendment that passed was
a no-op that basically said that the status quo remains.
Not only that, but there were people that voted to abolish non-free, so
to state that "we all voted to keep it" is erroneous.
> If we now decide to put all this non-free software into main, as some are
> starting to think doing about kernel firmware, documentation, fonts, whatever,
> then i believe not only is the vote on keeping free meaningless, but we are
> also not being honest with ourselves and our users, as this is in
> contradiction with the spirit of the social contract, even if some like to
> play with words.
I agree with that.
-- John
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