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Debian Can Now Amend Social Contract, DFSG
An anonymous reader writes "The Debian Project, creators of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution, has voted to allow amendments to their Social Contract and Free Software Guidelines, as long as the developers agree with a 3:1 majority. The full text of the various amendments can be found in the original call for votes. Debian developer and XFree86 packager Branden Robinson has already proposed an amendment to the Social Contract that removes the requirement to maintain an archive for non-free software or "contrib" software (free software that depends on non-free software to work). Debian could still maintain this archive, but would no longer be required to do so. The proposal also updates the Social Contract to clearly require all works in Debian to meet the Debian Free Software Guidelines, not just software, which had come up repeatedly in the discussions over the non-free "GNU Free Documentation Licence". Both of these updates have been under consideration for some time, but were waiting on the ratification of the amendment procedure. The Debian Project voted on this amendment using their modified Condorcet voting procedure, which allows voters to rank the choices in order of preference, eliminating the "lesser of two evils" effect common to simple majority voting."
Debian Unstable is not that out of date: Its got
Gnome 2.4, OpenOffice 1.0, Sodipodi 0.32+'
Check your apt-get setup, and update.
If you want a newer stable Debian, help. Debian is a volunteer organisation, after all; you don't
even need to be a DD. Just look at
http://www.debian.org/devel, look at the list of RC bugs, and post fixes to the BTS!
Regards,
Alastair McKinstry
Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
No. No, not at all. In fact it moves them farther away from Gentoo. In Gentoo's Social Contract, there is nothing explicitly stated about Documentation, but rather refers explicitly to software as binaries or sources. Debian has been working on productive discussions with the FSF over the GFDL for over two years, and this change is a direct result from those discussions. Most Debian Developers feel that documentation qualifies as software, and should be included under the DFSG as well.
Everything in Gentoo's Social contract is basically directly lifted from Debian's, although they decided not to take it all. The Gentoo people don't operate on nearly the same strict standards of Freedom that Debian does, and the differences in the Social Contracts, including the latest change, demonstrates that. If the Gentoo people decide to move in this direction too, it'll be because of more than two years of hard wrangling on debian-legal.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Because it goes against the very philosophy of Debian, right down to its initial charter if you want to go read it. Branden is one of the few people who actually still give a damn about what the project was originally founded for. He produces quality work (the Debian X packages are top notch, and he basically manages the porting work to other arch's because XFree puts out unportable crap) and he sticks to his ideals in the face of criticism.
He's not stopping you from using qmail, nor is he stopping people from putting up their own apt sources (people do it every day!) that host non-free, he just wants it out of the project so it can be free of this bizarre dichotomy.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Odds are you'll get flamed by a handful of Debian fanboys and applauded by a handful of Debian haters. I fit squarely in the "Debian fanboy" category, but I'm going to try to stay away from flaming.
Debian's distribution system has three tiers: stable, testing, and unstable. The stable release is the one you complained about having "way too old" packages, which is fully legitimate -- Debian's stable packages are old. The theory is to maintain a consistent, fully-supported system that is Really Stable, while maintaining the ability to provide security updates when necessary. This is especially useful on production servers, where it's a Bad Idea to change *anything* without contemplating it first. It works well for systems that shouldn't need coddling to maintain; if I were building a Debian system for my mother I'd use stable.
Obviously, stable won't work for everyone. For those who like the bleeding edge, there's unstable, which contains the Latest and Greatest Software (much of it prerelease; all of it updated frequently). Unstable might break everything, but when it works, you get Mozilla 1.5 without having to think about it and everything New and Improved!
And then there's testing, which contains all of the New and Improved! packages from unstable after they've had a few weeks to sit and haven't had any bug reports filed against them. Testing is good for those who don't feel compelled to live on the edge but don't want to live in 2001, either.
Debian isn't for everyone, but that's why Linux is free software -- "free" as in "freedom".
I'm the guy who put these policies in writing for Debian. I had the job of building the distribution, and these policies were the ones that would allow us to build it as best we could. If you were to take the time to do the job for a while, you'd probably come to the same conclusions.
Perhaps it's easier to think about when considering the patents and standards situation. We could make excellent standards incorporating all sorts of patents with all sorts of royalties. From an abstract engineering standpoint they'd be the best possible, but from an engineering practicality standpoint they'd be useless.Bruce
Bruce Perens.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Out of all the distros out there I personally like debian the best, and this is another reason why. With all the alternatives available to the open source community you have to hand it to Debian for allowing users easy freedom of choice. If you want only free software then don't add contrib or non-free to your sources.list. If you want stability and security on your computer, use woody. If you want new software and don't care if it meets free software definitions, use sid with contrib and non-free.
I have several computers all running debian and each have different setups depending upon what I'm using it for. Debian makes this very easy to do and IMHO, along with apt, is what makes debian better than the other distros. Ultimately this leads to a better separation of choice and still allows anyone to easily configure debian whatever way they want.
-Pat
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
I think it makes sense; I think that's actually something that makes Debian kind of cool; is that you can give your system its own (your) personality by modifying the sources.list file.
I don't think I really understood the possibilites until I discovered apt-get.org. It's a great concept, that you can "tune in" to the types of software that you want/need, and it doesn't all necessarily have to come from the official Debian servers.
This might give Debian users more choices, actually.
"Condorcet's method is one of several pairwise methods, which are great methods for electing people in single-seat elections (president, governor, mayor, etc.). Condorcet's method is named after the 18th century election theorist who invented it. Unlike most methods which make you choose the lesser of two evils, Condorcet's method and other pairwise methods let you rank the candidates in the order in which you would see them elected. The way the votes are tallied is by computing the results of separate pairwise elections between all of the candidates, and the winner is the one that wins a majority in all of the pairwise elections.
The best result of this is that if there is Candidate A on one extreme who pulls 40% of the vote, Candidate B in the middle who only pulls 20% of the vote, and Candidate C on the other extreme who pulls 40% of the vote, Candidate B will get elected as a compromise. Why? Because in a two-way contest between A and B, B would win with 60% of the vote, and in a two-way contest between B and C, B would also win with 60% of the vote. (Note that if B is a looney billionaire, he might not be able to win separate pairwise elections against anyone, and this would be reflected with Condorcet's method.)
Condorcet's method lets voters mark their sincere wishes for who they would like to win the election, without having to consider strategy ("I'd vote for Candidate B, but I'm afraid of wasting my vote."). It's really just a logical extension of majority rule when more than two choices are involved."
= 9J =
It's available in experimental. It probably hasn't hit the general user populace (and really hasn't hit those outside of the Debian userbase) but experimental is slated to take on certain roles once held by unstable. Any sort of -snapshot packages (basically cvs pulls that are pre-release) now go in to experimental rather than unstable. Unstable is for packages that the maintainer considers release quality but hasn't tested widely. Experimental is for when you're still working on the thing, but would like to allow testing anyway.
At least, that's the plan. It's pretty new but it seems to be working so far. Hopefully it'll lead to faster releases.
Anyhow, the xfree 4.3 packages are in experimental. The TODO list for those packages is posted in the subversion archive where the Debian packaging development is done (you can get to it from the Debian X Strikeforce webpage) so you can see how much is left before the packages migrate to unstable. As it is though, the 4.3 packages are there if you want them.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."