On Tue, 06 May 2025 at 13:58:57 +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
FWIW, in terms of free software ethics, I consider non-open data to be "less nasty" than non-free code.
Debian is unusual in the way we interpret our mission statement as extending to everything we distribute being Free, not just our executable code. Many other FOSS distributions apply the DFSG, the OSD, the FSF's guidelines or similar principles to executable code (only), and do not see a problem with having non-executable data that Debian would consider to be non-Free.
Game assets are a prominent example: for example Debian puts alien-arena(a Free engine for a non-DFSG game) in contrib, and alien-arena-data (the non-DFSG textures, models, etc.) in non-free, whereas distributions like Fedora and Mageia put all of it in their equivalent of main. Non-Free documentation is another common example.
I'm carefully avoiding saying "software" here because it's ambiguous whether that refers to executable code only, or to all works stored electronically; see also GRs 2004-003, 2004-004, 2006-004 which (somewhat) clarify that Debian is currently interpreting the DFSG as applying to all works, whether they are executable code or not.
smcv