Re: GR: Removal of non-free
> On Wed, Dec 31, 2003 at 03:53:50PM -0500, Branden Robinson responded to:
>
> > If someone were to implement a decent alternative for that infrastructure,
> > I would be amenable to leaving that part out of the social contract,
> > but I do not like your "drop it on the floor" approach to this issue.
>
> People who raise this point often seem to be constructing a catch-22; if
> we don't have an "alternative infrastructure" in place before dropping
> Debian's support for non-free, then there is a "pragmatic" objection to
> dropping non-free;
...
> I reject such callow and unprincipled[1] tactics. Hopefully you mean
> something less unsavory.
Interesting (re)definition of pragmatic. dict gives me several and they
all seem to have quite the opposite sense to what it attributes to either
callow or unprincipled.
I therefore reject this sophistry (look that one up along with cynic in
the oldest books you can find) with a proffered example of what pragmatism
in this case means to me.
It means I can use X on my laptop today. With all the usual pleasantries
I've come to expect from the value add that we call Debian, however it may
be capitalised.
Now maybe I'm an evil bastard because the commodity hardware I purchased
contains a not trivial to replace video chip, or maybe I'm just an
unfortunate victim of limited choices given there are only a couple of
companies supporting UXGA display hardware (which I covet for reasons which
should be fairly obvious to anyone who has one :-).
Either way, if I want to run X, I am entirely dependent on a binary only
driver released by the manufacturer of that chip. And in a 'things could
be better' kind of way, I'm grudgingly grateful that they at least permit
me to use the OS of my choice, and have taken this small step to support
our users, even if their legal teams are not prepared to also give us the
source to fix when it breaks.
Of course there are rumours that my bondage to this company has been broken
with the release of X4.3, but it is not nearly so easy to test that since it
is still not a part of Debian -- despite the date of its upstream public
release now being something of a distant memory in my mind.
What am I supposed to do in this case? Refuse to share in the work
already done by other developers to package the non free driver?
Reinvent the bitter joys of rpmfind? NMU XFree-4.3 perhaps?
While I wholeheartedly support making a very clear distinction between
software that *is* Debian and software that *works with* Debian, and can
even agree that in some cases we perhaps fail in that aspect wrt to the
impression some of our users may hold[1], I cannot support the deliberate
injection of devisiveness that you appear to so relish in this proposition.
Even in the face of some of the obvious legal clangers that we are yet to
satisfactorally resolve.
You have attempted to put the burden of proof on the early objectors to
this GR. I would have expected that someone with your experience in things
that DD's do _not_ support in an open vote would have been very aware
that the burden of proving merit lies with the protagonist.
How will voting for this in the affirmative actually *improve* Debian?
Even the original proposer seems resigned to the fact that this will
change nothing in the short term, save for the fact that it will give
one faction a doctrinal club to batter the other with and idle pedants
something else to scream that we have not done yet even though we said
we would.
Don't we have enough of a backlog of unfinished business for a while
without adding still more objectives to put on the back burner and
whittle away at developers who would otherwise be employed in more
productive pastimes?
Do you really believe, the culture of your upringing notwithstanding,
that simply declaring an axis of evil and pushing a wall up between
'us' and 'them' will ever make more of them want to be more like us?
Which do you think is more likely to influence the manufacturers of
my video chip in ways favorable to our core ideology? Providing them
with thousands of known users nagging them for better support for the
OS they love, or cutting off that part of their user base in ways that
(stupid and circular as it may be) makes us statistically insignificant
to their accounting department?
The social contract goes to great pains to guard against isolationist
interpretations of the Freedoms it promotes.
I would support patient moves to more clearly identify things which are
"a part of Debian" from "things released by Debian Developers"[2]
that for whatever reason, are not, or cannot yet, be a part of Debian.
The sort of knee jerk brickbat proposed here (we need tough new laws
now! We'll decide who to apply them against later...) would seem to
almost completely ignore the historical truism that the only things that
make it onto the Debian Project servers are things that DD's have deemed
worthy of spending their time on.
That we have vastly more free than non-free software on those servers
would seem to be ample testament to where, as a collective, our
priorities lie. That people are actually working toward making things
DFSG Free that currently may not be, is to me, an indicator that the
'good times' are going to continue to get better for at least a while
longer yet.
If things aren't going as fast as may please you, then FFS do something
more practical about it than legislate an open ended opinion without
any forward planning attached, let alone one that implicitly expects
other people will do both the planning and the work.
If you are *really*, *really*, *really* irritated by non free software
(as I am more often than not), and on a lesser note, can also get by
without it already, then take a leaf out of the books of the ancients
and help others get where you are today. Write the software they are
missing. Implement the systems that you decry as evasive vapourware.
Send personal hate mail to the maintainers of non-free packages you
especially deplore, and to anyone whos balance of free to non-free
contributions seems a little heavy on one end for your liking. Release
X4.3 so I can painlessly purge my non-free display server.
These things I can see making a difference eventually, one way or the
other. Simple bold faced politiking on the other hand, I don't have
such high hopes for.
I put time into adding and/or enhancing Free support for some of the
new hardware I have, but the machine will be long out of warranty and
likely out of blue smoke too before I have time to reimplement it all
myself. Just because the Linux kernel and gcc have now bootstrapped
themselves away from their own non free linked origins doesn't mean
that we are any lesser for still being only a part of the way along
that road. Our scope is also commensurately greater.
Anyway, this got longer than I might have hoped, but I also don't have
time for onanistic opinion pieces on these lists very often either.
I've got a freaking operating system to maintain and I'm not doing
anything to improve it while I'm occupied with this sort of nonsense.
My apologies to the choir,
Ron
[1] Especially perhaps the people who evangelise 'certification' since it
is clearly only the software that "works with" Debian which requires
such a thing. Things that *are* Debian are axiomatically
self-certifying :-)
[2] with all the usual qa guarantees and accountablility that such
packages currently also carry
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