Re: Social Contract GR's Affect on sarge
On Mon, Apr 26, 2004 at 09:59:53AM -0400, Raul Miller wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 26, 2004 at 02:56:09PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> > So, if the technical committee would like to comment on this issue,
> > take the decision out of my hands, or overrule any decision I might
> > otherwise make, now would be a good time.
>
> The technical committee can't override the constitution (nor foundation
> documents) any more than you can.
>
> However it might be worthwhile introducing a "Sarge Exception", making
> an explicit grandfather clause applicable only to sarge, and earlier
> distributions, so we can release the it. This is philosophically ugly,
> but then some people (perhaps RMS) think the same of debian as a whole.
>
> The language of that GR might run something like: In the past, we
> have had some disagreements between ourselves about what it is we're
> trying to do and what should go in a free distribution. We intend to
> fix those issues, going forwards, however to release the version of
> the distribution which we were about to release, it's going to have to
> include some components which might have been acceptable under our old
> social contract but which are definitely not acceptable under the new.
> We resolve to distribute the "Sarge Distribution" with packages licensed
> as they are currently licensed, even though these license conflict
> with the updated social contract. We'll also be providing in "Sarge"
> a document listing at least one such conflict for each of these packages.
Well, I'd second this, if it was put forth.
> As an aside... or as a possibly related issue, consider glibc -- here
> is a piece of software which is licensed as free (though RMS might say
> that the LGPL licensed components aren't as free as he'd like), but
> which in practice is still distributed in almost-binary form (you can't
> build current versions of glibc on linux without having extremely current
> binaries because the version skew is so great). In essence, the preferred
> form for working with this software must include its binaries... anyways,
> I've not thought this all the way through, but parts of glibc are GPL'd
> software and there's some possibility that without the sarge exception
> we wouldn't be able to distribute glibc (or maybe any of the GPL licensed
> parts of the tool chain) in its current form.
Huh??? This procedure is called bootstrapping...
I don't believe this is related to the issue in any way and just dilutes
your (valid, IMHO) point above.
Michael
--
Michael Banck
Debian Developer
mbanck@debian.org
http://www.advogato.org/person/mbanck/diary.html
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