Re: First Call for votes: General resolution for the handling of the non-free section
I have just plowed through a large wad of messages on this thread, and
the only thing I have to say is that every everything I have read is
self justification or off topic crap.
In principle I agree with Craig. The arguments over non-free are just
plain stupid.
There is no contradiction between declaring Debian to be totally about
Free Software, and the maintaining of a section called non-free. The
non-free packages are examples of software that fails to meet our
definition of free, which the rest of the world considers "free enough".
The fact that we can "legally" distribute this code makes that
distribution completely "OK" by the rest of the software community not
committed to software freedom as Debian defines it.
We provide examples of the right way to build Debian packages in many
different places, although I find the existing code base to be full of
both good and bad examples, our documentation is mostly self consistant.
Negative examples tend to improve our understanding faster than positive
ones. Being able to point to packages with "poor" licensing conditions
has always been helpful when trying to determine what is wrong with some
other license.
In any case, as one who was here before during and after the the
adoption of the Social Contract and Debian Free Software Guidelines, I
view these documents as the definition of what Debian is and what it
stands for, and I find all attempts to modify these documents as
attempts to modify Debian.
I don't have much time to devote to Debian these days, but that doesn't
mean that I don't still find it very important.
The Contract and Guidelines were written specifically to block political
modification of the goals and principles of Debian. If Debian is to
survive, this attempt to modify our principles must fail.
My advice is Less Crap and More Code!
Waiting is,
Dwarf
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