On Sun, Jan 25, 2004 at 03:19:53AM +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
> On 2004-01-25 02:14:58 +0000 Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au>
> wrote:
> >No, I think that the philosophy of forcing people to do the Right
> >Thing is evil.
For reference or emphasis, I think there are plenty of reasons for
voting for the non-free proposal other than following that philosophy,
none of which are evil, although some of them might be wrong or misguided.
> Small note: I think the proposed GR is closer to making the project
> not do the wrong thing.
Perhaps. I don't see any reason to think that distributing non-free
software is particularly "the wrong thing" (eg, I don't think there's
any reason to believe main would be noticably better if we didn't have
non-free), though.
If it's not a wrong thing, but merely a "less right" thing, I don't see
the harm in allowing it, and forbidding things that aren't harmful seems
a silly thing to do when promoting freedom in general, whether on a global
scale or a local one [0].
> IIRC, it doesn't make the project do any extra
> tasks and it doesn't necessarily force any people to do anything.
Well, it does: it forces the people adminning Debian's infrastructure to
remove non-free from it. This isn't particularly odious, though.
> If one thinks forcing people to do things is evil, then forcing
> continuation of non-free is evil in one way.
Forcing people to maintain the non-free infrastructure against their will,
or forcing people to maintain non-free packages against their will would
be bad. We don't do either, however.
Cheers,
aj
[0] For instance; the US constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech
isn't violated when a private company says "employees aren't allowed
to say `Debian is cool'", but that's still a violationof general
principles of freedom of speech. If you really want to distance your
company from that opinion, make sure employees add disclaimers or
something instead. Likewise, we don't stop uploads of flakey software
even if we refuse to release with it -- we just keep it in unstable
or experimental or in cvs.debian.org 'til it's not flakey. Likewise,
we don't stop uploads of non-DFSG-free software, we just put it
somewhere else until it's relicensed.
Now, sure, those policies could be changed: you could require
people to upload non-free software somewhere else on the internet,
or likewise for buggy software, or you could insist your employees
who want to advocate Debian quit and get some other job. None of
that's criminal, but it all speaks badly of the organisation doing
the forbidding, IMO.
(If you'd like a more analogous example, replace "Debian is cool"
with "Black people are stupid and inferior" -- sure it'd be nice if
no one thought that, just as it'd be nice if no one wrote non-free
software; but forbidding it isn't going to help anyone in either case)
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
Linux.conf.au 2004 -- Because we could.
http://conf.linux.org.au/ -- Jan 12-17, 2004
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