Re: RFD: amendment of Debian Social Contract
On Fri, Oct 31, 2003 at 12:22:24PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 31, 2003 at 08:47:54AM +0100, Sven Luther wrote:
> > And Branden, i find that trying to induce your fellow developers in
> > confusion with a global GR like that
>
> Why are you accusing me of this? I've explained why I feel as I do. Do
> you suspect me of insincerity?
Well, i will not go and try to guess what your real intentions are or
something such, i was just pointing out the real problem with your
GR, and the way it will be felt by many who look at it a bit.
That said, it is not yet your real GR proposal, since you said yourself
it is a draft, and i have thought a bit since then, and as i understand
it, just go ahead with it, people will then (including me if no one else
does) propose amendments during the real voting procedure and things
will sort themselves out.
That said, i still feel it is clumsy and confusion inducing to present
the thing like it is today, and i think it would be preferable to hold
the discussion about what we really want to do with non-free before
holding a vote with (unvoluntarily maybe) hidden consequences.
So, what is the plan, do we want to drop non-free from the archive, or
not. And what will be the consequence of dropping (or keeping) non-free ?
What will happen with the packages (like ocaml-doc) which are are
non-free documentation of free packages, and what about the other
documentation packages which i hear are in free and have similar
licencing problems.
What about the packages which have been in non-free in the past, and
have moved to main after long discussion with upstream about the
licencing issues ? Does keeping non-free in the archive give us more
strength to our tentative to convince upstream ? Or does it hinder us ?
What about hardware drivers in non-free or other software which have no
free alternative ?
And finally, what about true commercial software that we have or had in
non-free ? Like netscape or acrobat reader ?
This is the real question, the rest is just a tentative to hide this
discussion, and make the future decision on this easier to pass trough,
which will maybe take people by surprise later on if you tell them "ok
we have these load nice editorial changes that seem reasonable and we
ask you to vote on, oh, and BTW, we are also going to drop section 5 of
the Social Contract".
So i would propose that we don't put together the discussion about the
editorial and other changes, and the non-free issue. Better do it
cleanly and openly than risk later accusations of machiavelism, secret
cabal and black helicopter squads :))
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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