On Sun, 04 May 2025 at 17:30:21 +0200, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
We do not just
follow the law in deciding what to distribute and how to do it
I think it's important to distinguish between what we can't allow even
if we wanted to, because the law or other external factors don't allow it
(such as the need to avoid copyright infringement), and what we don't
allow because our own self-imposed rules don't allow it (such as the
distinction between main and contrib).
The things we can't allow because of external factors are a constraint
that we mostly share with other OS distributions, although there can be
differences if one distribution is more risk-averse than another (for
example I think Fedora is more cautious about patent risks than we are).
The things we don't allow as a self-imposed rule are entirely our
choice: for instance Fedora has chosen to allow non-Free firmware and
non-code objects (like documentation) in their equivalent of main, but
we have chosen not to allow that. These are a trade-off. If we are
overly strict with our self-imposed rules, we risk excluding important
functionality from our distribution. Conversely, if we are overly
permissive with our self-imposed rules, our users don't consistently get
all of the benefits of FOSS, because they can't assume that all of our
packages actually have all of those benefits.
if this
were the case, then there would never have been any need for a non-US,
non-free, or non-free-firmware section of our archive
For non-free and non-free-firmware (and contrib), yes you're correct:
not allowing those packages to be included in main is a self-imposed
rule, which we have chosen to follow.
But as far as I'm aware, non-US *was* about legal restrictions imposed
on us from the outside (specifically the USA's export rules at the time,
as applied to cryptography), and it isn't a distinction that anyone in
Debian would have chosen to make if external factors didn't force it on
us.
smcv
