Re: Possible draft non-free firmware option with SC change
Simon Richter <sjr@debian.org> writes:
> I agree that from a practical standpoint, this is unlikely to be a
> problem. The new language for the DSC also solves the conflict, but it
> is a regression for user -- before, anything "official" could always be
> redistributed because it had to fulfill the DFSG in order to be
> considered.
> The exception this carves out allows us to call the new installer
> "official", but does not give users any guarantees beyond the old DSC#5,
> which is basically "you have to check all the licenses for yourself."
> We might want to have a commitment that goes further than that,
> e.g. have a minimum set of criteria for firmware as well, as a service
> to users.
Yup, all of that makes sense to me.
My inclination is to handle that outside of the Social Contract for a
couple of reasons. One is that I think we may need to try a few different
compromises and be adaptable to find the right policy, and while
foundation documents are great for many things, encoding experiments isn't
one of them since they're hard to change. And the other is that I suspect
the policy is going to be complicated, or at least more complicated than
the SC is now. There are a lot of different licenses and a lot of
problems that come up and ideally we'd have a relatively comprehensive
document laying out what we will and won't put in the installer.
That's my rationale for making the SC relatively open-ended, even though
it would, as worded, allow some serious regressions for users for the
official media if we used the full scope of that additional exception.
That said, this is definitely a choice, and I'll definitely consider
alternate wording that would encode a more conservative choice if anyone
has any suggestions. Maybe there's a good and fairly simple way to phrase
this that I'd think is clearly better!
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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