Re: My platform
Right, we seem to agree quite well on the separation of the DPL's
personal opinions and the actions he should perform as DPL. So your
concerns seem to boil down to two things:
- You are not sure what I (personally) want to change about Debian.
- You are concerned that I may (as DPL) want to undo the recent
`interpretation of "free software"' GR.
To the latter, my few paragraphs must have been worded too strongly
because I do *not* want to undo the GR - both personally and
absolutely not as DPL. It is a wonderful thing to strive for a "100%
Free" distribution. What I was trying to get across is that if we
marginalise ourself by pushing for that goal too strongly and too
early, we run the risk of losing users and the broader community's
support.
To give a concrete example: My laptop has an extremely comon centrino
(ipw2200) wireless card. To support this card under Debian/Linux, I
need to install packages from contrib and download a firmware blob by
hand. To simply have the HTML4 specification easily available, I need
to install packages from non-free. What I'm trying to say is that by
removing all these things from main (imo) too quickly and too early,
we have instead *encouraged* all our users to use non-free. The best
outcome is of course that these things are available under a licence
we can all be happy with, but there is a clear distinction between
these "grey area" cases and "really non-free" stuff like Macromedia
flash plugins. I'm concerned that the long-term goal is going to
suffer by forcing users to make the choice between (a) going somewhere
else or (b) exposing themselves to poorly supported software from
non-free.
What I (personally) would like to see happen is for Debian to keep the
"100% Free" goal in mind and do what is best going to get us to that
point. Unfortunately, in the short term, I think that means making a
few careful compromises.
In answer to your first question about what I (personally) would like
to change about Debian, the answer is not a lot. From within Debian
(particularly at DPL election time), its easy to get the view that
there are all sorts of horrible problems but the truth is that Debian
currently works. At this moment, we have a slightly embarrassing
inability to declare a stable release and we have some people on our
mailing lists that like posturing in front of crowds, but Debian as a
technology and a community is in pretty good shape. What I hope to do
as DPL is represent that community and explain that technology to the
outside world, and to do what I can to allow us to continue to grow.
If you really want to press the issue, I'm happy to give you my
personal opinions about any particular issue - but I'm loath to simply
write down any half-baked schemes just to illustrate that I have a
brain ;) As DPL I would of course rely most heavily on the developers
already working in a particular area before arriving at a solution.
And yes, I consider this "mostly clean slate" approach a significant
advantage over other DPL candidates.
--
- Gus
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