"keep non-free" proposal
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I've been asked to re-write my amendment which proposes to
update the social contract, eliminating all independent issues
- -- the idea being that this will be less confusing to voters.
http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2004/debian-vote-200401/msg01636.html
So, I've redeveloped my proposal, starting from a basic rationale,
to determine which changes are "dependent" on that rationale, and
which are "independent":
Some people want to change the social contract, getting rid of some [but
not all] support for non-free. While there is no completely consistent
rationale for this change, I believe that a large part of it is based
on some misunderstandings of the social contract itself.
I'm proposing that we can update the social contract to eliminate the
ambiguities which encourage these misunderstandings, while retaining
the the sense and significance of the contract, and without any radical
changes in the project itself.
Old: "1. Debian Will Remain 100% Free Software"
If we ignore the rest of the social contract, there's two distinct
interpretations of this phrase.
[A] Software which Debian distributes which is completely free will
remain completely free.
[B] Debian only distributes free software and will continue distributing
only free software.
If we look at what Debian actually does, and/or the rest of the social
contract, [A] makes sense, but [B] contradicts both the rest of the
social contract and the current structure of Debian.
Unfortunately, [A] is a bit long to use as a title. In principle, the
title doesn't need to be completely elaborate -- the following text should
fill in the details. However, given that some people don't understand
that [A] is the intended meaning, I propose the following restatement:
New: "1. Debian Shall Continue Distributing Software That's 100% Free"
This is a bit longer than the original, but that's the cost of greater
precision.
Old: "We promise to keep the Debian GNU/Linux Distribution entirely
free software."
While this is a bit more specific than the title, it is in some sense
too specific -- it doesn't make any promise for GNU/Hurd, nor any of the
possible BSD distributions. In part because of the implied promise of the
title (if it's free, it continues to be free) this isn't a major defect.
However, despite this over-specific character, it still suffers from a
similar ambiguity to that contained in the section title:
[A] "entirely free" says how free the indicated software is.
[B] "entirely free" says how many pieces of software are free.
In this case, [B] is a bit more awkard, grammatically, but awkward
grammar isn't an obstacle for misunderstanding. I propose:
New: "We promise to keep the free software of the Debian System
Distributions completely free."
The rest of this section defines what we mean by "entirely free" or,
as I've rephrased it "completely free". It doesn't need any additional
changes to avoid the ambiguity which confuses some people. I'd like to
propose that the explicit mention of support for non-free be extended
to an explicit mention of support for free software, but this is an
independent change so I'm leaving it out of my proposal. Likewise,
I'm leaving several other changes out of my proposal.
Section 2 needs no change. Here, we're talking about software we write,
rather than software we support, and there's no need for us to write
non-free software.
Likewise, Sections 3 and 4 need no change. Section 4 gives some of our
rationale for supporting non-free software, but nobody seems confused
about the intent of Section 4.
Section 5 could use some improvement:
it goes into too much specific detail about some of our support for
non-free (mentioning specific technologies rather than general concepts),
it was written before there were any significant standards which could
be used to ensure interoperability with independent non-free software,
However, there is no great confusion about section 5.
So, here's my proposal -- and note that this is formally a proposed
amendement to Andrew Suffield's "get rid of section 5" proposal which
was introduced earlier this month.
I propose we change the title of section 1 of the social contract,
and the first sentence so they read:
1. Debian Shall Continue Distributing Software That's 100% Free
We promise to keep the free software of the Debian System
Distributions completely free.
We will continue to support free software, and non-free software, just
as we always have.
______________________________________________________________________
Thanks,
- --
Raul
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