On Wed, Oct 01, 2003 at 08:12:25PM -0600, Barak Pearlmutter wrote: | I think people are underestimating a couple things:
And I think that you are grossly exaggerating what are essentially non-problems. | - the lack of benefit of removing snippets (so far no convincing | practical advantage of removing them has been forthcoming. The | best argument made was "translations" but as others have pointed | out that's a pretty weak argument.) The benefit of removing non-free snippets that we know about is that Debian continues to remain, to the best of our knowledge, 100% Free Software as the social contract requires it to. | - the enormous number of snippets. I would be surprised if fewer | than 10% of our source tarballs contain snippets. Maybe a lot more. That doesn't affect the case for removing any such snippets when we become aware of their non-free status. | - the difficulty of finding them. enormous task. No-one is suggesting that we begin an auditing crusade to remove all of the non-free snippets that may or may not exist in Debian. On the other hand, when we become aware of the existence of any non-free snippets, Debian should be obliged (ny the social contract) to remove them in order to remain 100% Free Software. | + lots of bickering would start to happen Meh, what do you think we're doing now? :-P I suggest that if maintainers were considered to be intentionally not upholding the social contract by knowingly distributing non-free snippets with their Debian packages, then this would be likely to cause a lot of bickering. | + many patch files would be incompatible, and we'd have to deal | with these manually all the time. Er, what? Surely if the snippets are non-modifiable -- which is the problem, after all -- not to mention unrelated to the program's purpose, then there's no reason to patch them? | - the problems with double standards | | + if we remove snippets (ie consider them dingleberries) whenever | we find them, then some will be removed and others won't. How is this any worse than a perceived double-standard in the case where some packages are known to distribute arbitrary non-free files and yet are allowed into main, while other packages are 100% Free Software? | people will figure this out, and start bloating out their | licenses with the materials they used to put in snippets. I think you over-estimate the importance people attach to their snippets, and their snippets' inclusion in Debian. | + license bloat & proliferation: due to the above double standard | wrt political text in licenses, pretty soon we'll see all kinds | of license bloat, and proliferation as people get into the | habit of putting crap in their licenses. Once again, I see no reason to believe that this is ever likely to happen. | Result: snippet-wars, with people looking for snippets in | packages to complain about, as a matter of revenge/symmetry. Assuming that this is ever a likely to occur as a result of removing non-free snippets from Debian, isn't this outcome rather similar to an audit of Debian for non-free snippets, something which you complained was an unfeasibly large task for anyone to attempt? | right to decide to embark on this potentially very disruptive course | without full consultation with the body of debian. Are you really implying that upholding Debian's Social Contract is a "potentially very disruptive" course? Cheers, Cameron.
