On Tue, Aug 23, 2022 at 10:39:57AM +0200, Simon Josefsson wrote: > As far as I can tell, both Steve's and Gunnar's proposal would make > Debian less of a free software operating system than it is today. That > makes me sad. My preference for an outcome would be along the following > lines. > > ================== > > We continue to stand by the spirit of the Debian Social Contract §1 > which says: > > Debian will remain 100% free > > We provide the guidelines that we use to determine if a work is > "free" in the document entitled "The Debian Free Software > Guidelines". We promise that the Debian system and all its components > will be free according to these guidelines. We will support people > who create or use both free and non-free works on Debian. We will > never make the system require the use of a non-free component. > > Therefor we will not include any non-free software in Debian, nor in the > main archive or installer/live/cloud or other official images, and will > not enable anything from non-free or contrib by default.
I can interprete that as having non-free available and installed by default is acceptable, as long as there is a way not to use the non-free part. > We also continue to stand by the spirit of the Debian Social Contract §5 > which says: > > Works that do not meet our free software standards > > We acknowledge that some of our users require the use of works that > do not conform to the Debian Free Software Guidelines. We have > created "contrib" and "non-free" areas in our archive for these > works. The packages in these areas are not part of the Debian system, > although they have been configured for use with Debian. We encourage > CD manufacturers to read the licenses of the packages in these areas > and determine if they can distribute the packages on their CDs. Thus, > although non-free works are not a part of Debian, we support their > use and provide infrastructure for non-free packages (such as our bug > tracking system and mailing lists). > > Thereby re-inforcing the interpretation that any installer or image with > non-free software on it is not part of the Debian system, but that we > support their use and welcome others to distribute such work. As you indicate yourself, this is an interpretation of the SC. I would really prefer that such a question was not open to interpretation and that the SC was changed to make it more clear what we mean. I don't actually understand what this part of your text is saying. Are you saying that an image with non-free software on it is non-official because it's not part of the Debian system? That is not something I read in that text. I would also like to point out that the Secretary has the power to adjudicates any disputes about interpretation of the constitution, but not about the foundation documents. Kurt
