Re: "keep non-free" proposal
Raul Miller wrote:
>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.
This interpretation is a no-op. Read it again: it doesn't commit Debian to do
ANYTHING. At least, not anything in Debian's power. If Debian distributed
NO completely free software, Debian would satisfy this interpretation!
The debian-legal mailing list and many other people concluded that this is a
ridiculous and unacceptable interpretation.
>[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,
No, it doesn't. See above.
> but [B] contradicts both the rest of the
>social contract and the current structure of Debian.
[C] The "Debian distribution" will consist entirely of "Free Software".
This is the correct consensus interpretation.
You've also been ignoring the issue of the contentious meaning of "software",
which Andrew Suffield's proposal deals with. It's been made clear that the
authors of the Social Contract intended it to refer to "that which is not
hardware" -- "Everything on the CD" in Bruce Perens's words. This is also the
consensus debian-legal interpretation. However, it's not the natural
interpretation of all people, which is why Andrew's proposal removes uses of
"software" in favor of more unambiguous wording.
Your proposals do not help deal with this issue. Andrew's does.
I believe that a large portion of your proposals are based on
misunderstandings of the Social Contract itself -- the very misunderstandings
which Andrew's editorial-fix GR is designed to deal with.
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