Re: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessment
Hello, I think we should either get Debian in FSF [free-distros list][1], or document (from our POV) why Debian is not there. I'm looking for Debian volunteers interested in the topic and willing to participate in a joint Debian / FSF team that will work toward that goal without prejudices. The ideal outcome is an agreed upon list of Debian bugs that need to be solved, according to the usual Debian mechanisms, and with no special treatment due to their political origin. Any news, current status? The FSF page says the same about the Debian: https://web.archive.org/web/20120709033917/https://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.html vs https://web.archive.org/web/20131222091240/https://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.html -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20131225144550.gb22...@darkstar.order.hcn-strela.ru
Re: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessment
On Wed, Dec 25, 2013 at 06:45:50PM +0400, Sergey B Kirpichev wrote: Any news, current status? None that I know. I'd be really interested in working with the FSF in a way that helps us both out a lot, and I'd really love to get an official endorsement. I know it'll be hard, and I know it'll require some work, but I do have faith that it *can* be done. zack@ was the last person to work with the FSF on this, and I've not heard much else. Hopefully we can make it happen :) Cheers, Paul -- .''`. Paul Tagliamonte paul...@debian.org | Proud Debian Developer : :' : 4096R / 8F04 9AD8 2C92 066C 7352 D28A 7B58 5B30 807C 2A87 `. `'` http://people.debian.org/~paultag `- http://people.debian.org/~paultag/conduct-statement.txt signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Buying hardware with Debian money
Hi Mason, Sorry for the delayed answer. On 16/12/13 at 22:33 -0500, Mason Loring Bliss wrote: On Sun, Oct 20, 2013, Lucas Nussbaum lea...@debian.org wrote: I received a few requests for hardware purchases, that I think are worth discussing with the project as a whole in order to progress towards having clear guidelines for what is acceptable and what isn't in terms of spending Debian money. Please provide feedback on the proposed decisions -- they are not final yet. Hello, and apologies for being so late in responding. I only noted this discussion after a DPL report, and it's taken me some time to subscribe and reply. Thanks for your feedback, even if the decisions are final now. Those decisions were hard to make, and I don't think that we can draw general rules from them yet. Some comments inlined below. I'd like to generally note that I'm not in favour of buying hardware for individual developers. Hardware for Debian infrastructure is obviously distinct from this, and I'd suggest that even hardware purchased for a particular role and maintained within the Debian infrastructure would be reasonable. Right Going down the list: A. Memory expansion cards for m68k buildds (expected cost: 500 EUR) Infrastructure investment - reasonable. B. Powerful machine for d-i development (expected cost: 1.5k-2k EUR?) Unreasonable. The developer should be using his own hardware. If the Project is to supply hardware, it should live within the Project's infrastructure. The developer is specifically noting that the machine will be running virtual guests for the actual development work, and as such I can't imagine why this cannot live inside the Debian infrastructure, thus making it more available to the community as a resource when this develop doesn't need it for active work. The developer argues against a remote machine, saying, I do realize having some nice hardware racked up in some datacenter would be nice for testing purposes, but until automated regression testing is implemented, one needs to rely on clicking and typing into a VM, so as to debug/develop some framework to perform automated testing. This can readily be accomplished with VNC. The developer also notes that prepairing an upload requires a local machine, which, again, suggests that a machine managed within the Debian infrastructure doesn't present the requisite level of trust... This request simply bothers me. It is, I believe, too much to ask of the Project. Some points that contributed to making this decision are: - debian-installer is a central part of Debian, where we have historically had problems attracting contributors (despite trying) - the developer in question is the main contributor to d-i, and has been for some time - developing debian-installer efficiently requires fast hardware, faster than what can be found in a medium-range laptop - testing debian-installer often requires running the installer interactively. This could be done over VNC, but this is really far from being comfortable. Typically, you want to be able skip very fast to the point that you are working on (without reading all the questions :-) ), and latency and low bandwidth makes this very hard. - the machine would be only used for Debian work (my original mail said primarly -- the developer clarified in private) - if the developer were to stop his involvement in d-i, the machine could be returned to the project So, I really saw this purchase as purchasing Debian infrastructure hosted at a Developer's rather than in a datacenter. C. Laptop for developer (expected cost: 1k-1.5k EUR?) Again, individual developers should supply their own hardware. (that request was not approved in the end) My perspective: I donate a small sum to SPI, earmarked expressly for Debian, monthly. I imagine there are many other people who do the same thing. Seeing these requests for gifts from the Project makes me mentally add up how many months of my contributions are going to satisfy a developer's desire for something that he'd really ought to be providing for himself. I believe in the election process and I have no illusion that I'm in a position to try to micro-manage how the Project uses its available resources, but it really won't take seeing this sort of thing more than once or twice before I redirect this particular portion of my charitable giving elsewhere. I would personally be far too embarassed to ask a non-profit group to which I volunteered development time to give me equipment for the purpose, rather than simply asking for the use of Project-managed resources if my own resources seemed somehow insufficient. I agree with you that using the project's resources to provide gifts to developer is not acceptable. On the other hand, many Debian contributors make life choices that result, for example, in jobs where they can spend time on Debian during work hours, in exchange of a lower
Re: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessment
On Wed, Dec 25, 2013 at 12:06:43PM -0500, Paul Tagliamonte wrote: zack@ was the last person to work with the FSF on this, and I've not heard much else. Correct. Unfortunately I haven't heard much else either. Discussions went on on the fsf-collab-discuss list on alioth, but the state of the art is still that we're waiting for the FSF to refine current freeness assessment into more actionable items. Cheers. -- Stefano Zacchiroli . . . . . . . z...@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o Former Debian Project Leader . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o . « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club » signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessment
Correct. Unfortunately I haven't heard much else either. Discussions went on on the fsf-collab-discuss list on alioth, but the state of the art is still that we're waiting for the FSF to refine current freeness assessment into more actionable items. Just out of curiosity: What's their definition of freedom anyway? Forcing the user to not use non-free software takes away their freedom, but probably the FSF does not get that, or they wouldn't be pushing the GPL so badly. But is there any real reason behind that, apart from the religious ones? -nik P.S.: I would prefer non-free and contrib being completely removed as well, but my question is why that has to be forced on others. -- Wer den Grünkohl nicht ehrt, ist der Mettwurst nicht wert! PGP-Fingerprint: 3C9D 54A4 7575 C026 FB17 FD26 B79A 3C16 A0C4 F296 signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessment
On Wed, Dec 25, 2013 at 07:49:37PM +0100, Dominik George wrote: Correct. Unfortunately I haven't heard much else either. Discussions went on on the fsf-collab-discuss list on alioth, but the state of the art is still that we're waiting for the FSF to refine current freeness assessment into more actionable items. Just out of curiosity: What's their definition of freedom anyway? You don't know what their definition of freedom is, but continue to assess their religious views? This doesn't look very useful to me. Michael -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20131225190307.ga29...@raptor.chemicalconnection.dyndns.org
Re: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessment
Just out of curiosity: What's their definition of freedom anyway? You don't know what their definition of freedom is, but continue to assess their religious views? This doesn't look very useful to me. I know very well what their definition of freedom is. My question challenges the valdity of their definition. -nik -- * concerning Mozilla code leaking assertion failures to tty without D-BUS * mirabilos That means, D-BUS is a tool that makes software look better than it actually is. PGP-Fingerprint: 3C9D 54A4 7575 C026 FB17 FD26 B79A 3C16 A0C4 F296 signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessment
On Wed, Dec 25, 2013 at 08:13:29PM +0100, Dominik George wrote: Just out of curiosity: What's their definition of freedom anyway? You don't know what their definition of freedom is, but continue to assess their religious views? This doesn't look very useful to me. I know very well what their definition of freedom is. My question challenges the valdity of their definition. I suggest you take that to their forums, then. Michael -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20131225193251.gb29...@raptor.chemicalconnection.dyndns.org
Re: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessment
On Wed, Dec 25, 2013 at 2:32 PM, Michael Banck mba...@debian.org wrote: On Wed, Dec 25, 2013 at 08:13:29PM +0100, Dominik George wrote: Just out of curiosity: What's their definition of freedom anyway? You don't know what their definition of freedom is, but continue to assess their religious views? This doesn't look very useful to me. I know very well what their definition of freedom is. My question challenges the valdity of their definition. I suggest you take that to their forums, then. Whatever we do, perhaps a BOF at LibrePlanet 2014 (March 22-23) is in order? Michael -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20131225193251.gb29...@raptor.chemicalconnection.dyndns.org -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/cacfairyq_zdeapsjtyj3n-crkqcczdys1bzddklndb5i0_o...@mail.gmail.com
Re: Buying hardware with Debian money
On Wed, Dec 25, 2013 at 07:00:10PM +0100, Lucas Nussbaum wrote: So, I really saw this purchase as purchasing Debian infrastructure hosted at a Developer's rather than in a datacenter. Alright, that's well-reasoned. Something I'd throw in as a possible addition to this would be a formal agreement for the use of such hardware, including such elements as a goal for the work driving the purchase, a notion of milestones to be accomplished, and an idea of at what point the hardware should be delivered back to the project or, alternately, a notion of when the hardware will be considered to have achieved its purpose and can be henceforth considered owned by the developer. Put simply, your reasoning seems valid; I'd ideally like to see some agreement in place to try to ensure that the investment pays for itself. I don't suspect this sort of thing will be a frequent event, and it's entirely possible that the developers in question are well-enough known to project management that there's a defacto character reference at work as well, which would be reasonable. Just food for thought. -- Mason Loring Bliss (( If I have not seen as far as others, it is because ma...@blisses.org )) giants were standing on my shoulders. - Hal Abelson -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20131226004744.gd13...@blisses.org
Re: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessment
On Wed, Dec 25, 2013 at 07:49:37PM +0100, Dominik George wrote: Just out of curiosity: What's their definition of freedom anyway? Forcing the user to not use non-free software takes away their freedom, but probably the FSF does not get that, or they wouldn't be pushing the GPL so badly. You're looking at the issue the wrong way - you're looking at it from the Free Software is good because it helps programmers lens, not the Free software is good because it helps users lens. Free Software is meaningless without having free users, users that aren't able to take control of their software are not free users, they're slaves to the creators of the software. Permissive licensing is good for *programmers*, since it gives *corperations* and *people* the freedom to do stuff with the code, not the *user*. The GPL asserts that the *users* have the freedom. I say this as someone who licenses most of his work under the MIT/Expat license. But is there any real reason behind that, apart from the religious ones? Yes. And for the record - Debian's guidelines are *more* strict than the FSF's in some places, and *less* in others. For instance, we have no issue with pointing users to non-free software, whereas the FSF would have a huge issue with this. We have a huge issue with the GFDL's invariant clause, the FSF clearly doesn't. Don't write this off as religious without understanding where we as a project stand - we're plenty religious ourselves. Cheers, Paul -- .''`. Paul Tagliamonte paul...@debian.org | Proud Debian Developer : :' : 4096R / 8F04 9AD8 2C92 066C 7352 D28A 7B58 5B30 807C 2A87 `. `'` http://people.debian.org/~paultag `- http://people.debian.org/~paultag/conduct-statement.txt signature.asc Description: Digital signature
