On Friday, October 3, 2025 9:27:03 AM Mountain Standard Time Gunnar Wolf wrote: > Soren Stoutner dijo [Thu, Oct 02, 2025 at 05:02:13PM -0700]: > >Like I said, I know nothing about XLibre or its history. But I think it is > >important to state here that I am categorically opposed to any software being > >excluded from Debian because of the politics of the developers (as long as > >those politics are not included in the software itself). > > There are some things we don't want to drop in public channels. > > There is known history of the XLibre authors actively conducting a hate > campaign that resulted in a strong personal prejudice (economically and > socially) to a Debian Developer, and that campaign carried on to try to > further harm them. > > Of course I am not talking in the name of the project. I cannot. > > But I strongly support Debian not willing to engage with toxic developers. > > >To be clear, I am not saying that anyone *has* to package this software. > >Also, I am not saying that Debian should accept any software that is below > >its technical standards (an argument that nobody has yet made regarding > >XLibre). > > I hope nobody will do the quite nontrivial technical work to get this > packaging done. And I would not be surprised if our ftp-master team (or > whatever it is called by then) eventually refuses to include in Debian > software that's more a liability than anything else. I sincerely hope that Debian never goes down the very dangerous path of banning software in Debian because of what developers do outside of Debian. The reason why I say that is that every single one of us, without exception, does something in our personal lives that someone else doesn’t like. Every single one of us could be banned by that standard. The inclusion of software in Debian should be judged based on the quality of the software. To be a bit more explicit about this, I previously stated that banning such software would be against the spirit of DFSG #5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups Someone in this thread responded that DFSG #5 is speaking about what the license must allow users to do with Debian, not what software must be included in Debian. That is correct. When I wrote my statement I was careful to say that banning software from Debian based on things we don’t like about the people who developed it was against the *spirit* of the DFSG #5. However, that particular wording was probably subtle enough that its meaning was easy to miss, so I will express the idea more verbosely below. What the DFSG #5 says is that Debian will not distribute software under a license that prohibits a particular group of people from using it. DFSG #6 expresses a related idea, which is that Debian will not distribute software under a license that prohibits it being used in a particular field of endeavor. Since previous posts in this thread have accused the developers of XLibre of being Nazis, let me give an example of what this means for Nazis. If the Nazi party wants to use Debian as the official OS for all of their operations at their party headquarters, we cannot prohibit them from doing so. If they want to use Debian to serve their webpage and maintain their mailing list, we are OK with that. If they want to use the Debian LibreOffice packages to write their newsletters spewing hate, we will not stop them. If somebody writes software and releases it under a license that says, “Everyone may use this software except for Nazis,” Debian will not distribute that software, because doing so would be against our founding principles. But why? Why do we do this? Before going on, I would recommend that everyone answer the above question to their own personal satisfaction. When the Nazis and their ideology is so obviously evil, why don’t we just say that DFSG #4 and #5 doesn’t apply to them? The reason is because DFSG #4 and #5 must apply to everyone or it protects no one. We do this not because we agree with what the Nazis are doing, but because we want our own freedom to run software the way we choose. Either everyone has that right or, in the end, nobody does. I make this point because, even though it isn’t explicit in our founding documents, the same principle applies to the software we include in Debian. We can’t have it both ways. We can’t stand for non-discrimination in how Debian is used but discriminate against contributors. To be completely clear, I am speaking about discrimination against contributors based on things they do in their personal lives separate from the quality of the code they produce. I am speaking about discriminating against contributors because of their political views, or their sexual views, or their religious views, or other similar things. It is completely appropriate for Debian to have high standards of quality for code accepted into the project. One example I used previously is that if a developer had *intentionally* tried to introduce a security bug into Debian, it would be appropriate to ban future contributions from that developer. Also, if a developer had a track record of writing code that was inordinately full of security bugs, to the degree that there was a loss of confidence in their ability to write secure code, I could also see Debian banning contributions from that developer. I am not aware of either of these two things ever happening in the history of Debian (I would be interested to know if they ever have), but I give them as examples of what I would consider to be appropriate reasons to ban a developer’s code. In addition to banning a developer based on the quality of their code, there are also be reasons to ban a developer based on their interactions with Debian. For someone interacting directly with Debian in the form of maintaining packages or writing to the mailing lists, we maintain a set of acceptable behavior. If they do not respect that acceptable behavior, then it is appropriate for us to ban them from writing to the mailing lists or block them from otherwise interacting with the project in the ways where they have previously acted inappropriately. So, if someone sends a message to this list with a Nazi rant, then it is appropriate for us to ban them from sending messages to the list. But, if they post a Nazi rant somewhere else on the internet, but all of their interactions with Debian are respectful, they we should ignore whatever they do outside of Debian. Why? Because we do not discriminate. Because these same rules protect us as much as it protects them. Because every one of us does something in our own personal lives that someone else hates. Because once Debian goes down the road of attempting to police what everyone does outside of Debian, it all falls apart. -- Soren Stoutner soren@debian.org
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