Re: Q to all candidates: dropping SC §5
Stefano Zacchiroli <zack@debian.org> writes:
> But let's embrace your point of view for now! It seems to me that doing
> so result in the impossibility to *ever* drop SC §5. Because:
> - The only way to drop SC §5 is by voting, and we know from experience
> that voting on something does not make the needed volunteer to
> implement the vot (= getting rid of contrib/ non-free) magically
> appear out of thin air.
FWIW, I'm pretty sure the only way that contrib/non-free will ever be
removed is by voting as well, as I suspect I'm not the only one who would
immediately propose a GR to preserve the current contrib/non-free
arrangement should it look like there was a serious effort underway to
eliminate it, at least until there's a substantial change in the number of
common systems that require non-free firmware or other drivers to be
basically functional.
There are two possibilities for such a proposal: either we keep running
contrib/non-free like we do now but just change the domain names, or we
actually try to eliminate them from the project. The former is a bunch of
work (for people outside the project as well as in) for no real benefit.
The latter would be a serious mistake. I think it would run a serious
risk of turning Debian into something like the various FSF attempts at a
"complelely free" Linux distributions, which are mostly interesting
curiousities but don't gather critical mass in part because people
struggle to run them on normal hardware and do normal tasks with them.
I'm particularly concerned about keeping Debian a viable distribution for
enterprise and large-scale server deployments, where, for better or worse,
a well-integrated way to add non-free firmware is simply mandatory in
practice right now.
So I'm not sure this is a good DPL question, as the DPL really isn't
likely to get much of a say about this. The current compromise doesn't
make anyone exactly happy, but it's been workable for a very long time,
and I think it's a bad tactical decision for the project to re-open the
difficult argument that led to that compromise.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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