Dear candidates,
do you think the time is ripe for dropping section §5 of the Debian
Social Contract [1], namely "Works that do not meet our free software
standards" or should we wait more?
[1]: https://www.debian.org/social_contract
Some thoughts on the current situation:
- By default we only enable the main software archive on user machines.
To find non-free software users should be relatively advanced: know
how to find the non-free images, know how to add "contrib non-free" to
their sources.list, etc.
Unexperienced users that need non-free software to make their machine
works are hence way more likely to ditch Debian all together ("it
doesn't work on my laptop!") and switch to another distribution that
install non-free stuff by default, than anything else.
- contrib and non-free are maintained on a best effort basis, by
developers interested and motivated in doing so.
- Dropping SC §5 would not necessarily mean removing contrib non-free
from our mirror network, from our dak instance, etc. It might simply
mean stopping publicly sanctioning that Debian aims at supporting
mixed free/non-free setup. Developers interested in working on
contrib/non-free will not be stopped by doing so even if SC §5 would
get dropped.
No matter the timing, do you see dropping SC §5 as a worthwhile goal at
all?
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli . . . . . . . zack@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o
Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o
Former Debian Project Leader . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o .
« the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »
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