Re: "keep non-free" proposal
> > How do you compromise between A and B when the the distinguishing
> > feature is that A wants to have nothing to do with B?
On Tue, Jan 27, 2004 at 12:10:30PM -0800, Benj. Mako Hill wrote:
> The compromise is reached by drawing firm limits what around what
> Debian is (or what and how it will remain) while drawing different
> limits around what it can distribute.
How does that work? Seems to me that you can achieve A associates with B,
or A does not associate with B, but neither are compromise.
Firm limits sort of implies "A does not associate with B", but
even changing this from an explicit statement to an implicit
statement doesn't make it compromise.
> > The Debian Project is an association of individuals who have made
> > common cause to create a free operating system.
> >
> > I'm not changing this at all.
>
> The current subtitle reads to me as a definition of what Debian is and
> a commitment to how it will remains. Your proposal reads to me as a
> statement about how some of the software Debian distributes is
> licensed. If this isn't your intention, I apologize for implying that
> it was -- but your intentions are not being served by the current
> suggested text IMHO.
The problem with the current subtitle is that it appears to extend
to packages which it shouldn't cover.
But the current subtitle was not intended as a definition of Debian as
a whole, only the "Debian GNU/Linux Distribution". You can see this in
numerous places in the social contract.
The problem with my currently proposed subtitle is that it appears to
not extend to packages which it should cover. Pretty much everyone has
objected to that.
> Just because Debian developers have gotten together together to work
> on free software does mean their distribution is a totally Free
> Software. I think this fact needs to be immediately clear in the
> subtitle and I don't think it is in this suggested version.
The problem with your "immediately clear" idea is that if it were possible
to be "immediately clear" on this topic we wouldn't have a need for the
social contract and dfsg.
The whole point of writing the social contract, and the whole point of
writing the dfsg, is that these concepts aren't intuitively obvious but
need to be spelled out for people.
> > > Moreover, the way you've worded this makes me think that as long as
> > > Debian has a single GPL'ed shell script in a sea of non-free software,
> > > we're doing our job.
> >
> > That is an ambiguous interpretation of the subtitle if you ignore the
> > rest of the social contract. The real mystery is why people want to get
> > all the meaning from the subtitles and ignore the rest of the contract.
>
> The subtitles should be an accurate reflection of rest of the
> document.
As long as you don't mistake the reflection for the actual, that's not
a problem.
> The subtitles are the bits that get quoted all over the
> place -- like it or not. If we have the ability to make a firm and
> largely unambiguous statement and then elaborate and explain it in the
> body, we should.
Which begs the questions: how large does the unambiguousness need to
be, how much precision (verbosity) can we tolerate, and what flavors of
ambiguity can we live with?
--
Raul
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