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Social Contract Amendment May Bump Sarge To 2005
An anonymous reader submits "Debian's Release Manager Anthony Towns announced that after the Grand Resolution to amend the Social Contract has been successful (it does not only apply to software any more), vital parts to modern Linux systems, such as important documentation, firmware needed for proper hardware support will have to be removed from the distribution before the next release. Moreover, the upcoming installer will need to be changed. He goes on to say that he does not expect this to happen by the end of this year which means that Sarge will not be released in 2004."
I think there's a point you missed though. Even though Debian is well supported and is infact a good linux distro, it's still aged. There is a definite trend towards open source operating systems right now and I think Debian is going to miss out on this to sa large extent. People (and by people I don't mean individual computer enthusiasts) are going for the more main stream and updated distros such as Fedora. Once you install a distro on a box you tend not to just replace it with a different distro on a whim. I know people who use Red Hat 7.3 for servers still and as long as the hard drive is alive and assuming they don't kill the OS, it will be running for a long time to come.
In that respect I do think distros such as Debian and Gentoo will fade away to a large extent. They will always be around, but not widely used.
Of course thats just my opinion.
See http://www.debian.org/devel/constitution, in particular sections #4 and A.
Oh yea?
Sometimes I wonder if all the distro zealots have stopped to realize this one simple fact:
Every distro is using OSS. Yes, it may be tweaked and patched here and there..but beneath all the branding and logos...it's STILL the same software.
[Of course, I'll throw in my 2 cents as well. I've used both Debian and Gentoo. Honestly, Gentoo is my path to take...I now run it on 3 servers [1 is production] and a firewall and once they're set up..they just run. Not to mention extremely easy to update. ]
This is what contrib and non-free are for. Debian's new social contract simply says that it will not depend upon non-free goods of any sort--not that it won't be provided.
No comment.
A few disclaimers, from someone who reads debian-* lists regularly, but isn't part of the project...
(1) Much of what is proposed is about moving pieces of the OS from the "main" archive to the "non-free" archive; "main" is what you get on the Debian CDs, "non-free" is available via ftp. So it is probably less convenient to obtain, but not totally expunged from debian.
Of course, components that affect your initial installation are more sensitive to the method of distribution, but other projects are welcome to build mixed installer tools that combine the default debian installer with the non-free firmware.
(2) This was only announced about 24 hours ago. Things are still in a state of flux, so don't take the "all this is happening and sarge is now year(s) away" too literally.
(3) Don't read into the summary that this solely a personal decision by Anthony Towns, or that he is necessarily in favor of the proposed changes.
You mistake the Debian maintainers' pragmatic licencing approach for religious zealotry.
They are approaching the Debian GNU/Linux as a Free Software project, not a feature rich distribution project. Once you yourself can understand what the philosophy of the Debian project, you might understand that they are being incredibly pragmatic.
Regardless of how long Copyright is extended for (eg: Disney's current goal of forever - 1 day), no matter how tight the DMCA becomes, you will always be allowed to run the complete Debian GNU/Linux operating system.
Licencing and legal restrictions on your hardware may prevent you running Debian on your specific hardware (thanks to "Trustworthy Computing" taking over from "binary only"), but there will be no licence or legal restrictions to your using Debian on any hardware that it does work on.
You have to be a special type of person to be a Debian developer - these are people who want to dedicate their time to having an operating system they can safely give to their friends and family without risking a gaol term. People who aren't Debian developers (or fanatical users) are the ones who'd hand over their soul for the next cool gimmick ("yes, I'll accept the condition of only running the software you let me, if you'll let me pay $200 for Halo 4! That game's so cool I don't need freedom!").
Most likely, the non-free stuff will not be completely removed, but rather, moved to the non-free section of the distribution. (Strictly speaking, non-free isn't part of the distribution, so things moved there have been removed from Debian, but the packages are available from the same servers, and interoperate with the free stuff.)
The NVidia drivers, for example, work just fine in Debian. Not only is the nvidia-kernel-source package available via apt-get, but it works with Debian's kernel-package build system to produce .deb packages of the built modules. The fact that the drivers are non-free don't affect me in the least; I use them the same way I use any other third-party module package.
I'm not particularly bothered by this change. I'm slightly bothered by the delay of the Sarge release, but since I run Sid on my desktop, and my servers do fine with Woody plus an occasional backport, it's not that big a deal. And it does pretty much answer the question of whether GNOME 2.6 will make it into Sarge. :-)
The good people at Fedora Legacy are providing updated RPMs for RH 7.2, 7.3, and 8.0, and will be providing support for 9.0 when it's EOLed in a few days. They've been a bit sluggish getting update RPMs out recently due to download server problems, but the support's still there.
(I tell people "Debian is fanatic about this stuff so we don't have to be." If you just use Debian main, you are using nothing but free software. Easy!)
Debian has two areas for software that doesn't meet the DFSG: "contrib" and "non-free". Now that this proposal has passed, not only software but documentation and firmware will be migrated out of main and into contrib or non-free.
The first thing I thought when I read this was: I wonder if Richard Stallman will finally be satisfied?
Last August, RMS was asked in an interview, which distribution of GNU/Linux he would recommend. He said he would recommend GNU/LinEx, because it contains no non-free software. As it turns out, he was mistaken about that; GNU/LinEx still has traces of non-free software in it, just as Debian has. He withdrew the recommendation of GNU/LinEx (without, to my knowledge, offering any recommendation to replace it).
RMS has said that he cannot recommend any distro that offers up free and non-free software from the same servers, or contains references to any servers that offer non-free software. (Keep in mind that his definition of non-free is not identical to the "non-free" of the Debian project.) So Debian, the most free distro I know, is still not recommended by RMS.
You can read a somewhat acrimonious discussion thread about this here if you like:
linux.debian.legal discussion archived by groups.google.com
Note that Debian is so committed to free software that they are booting FSF documentation from main, because of the newest version of the "Free Documentation License" that allows invariant sections. Invariant sections are clearly free according to the FSF, but they are not in compliance with the DFSG, and thus do not go in main anymore. Discussion here:
another linux.debian.legal discussion archived by groups.google.com
I will close with a final quote from RMS, on the possibility that Debian might one day strip out the non-free software to his satisfaction:
P.S. If you asked me for a recommendation for a truly free distro, I'd suggest Debian main. If you don't put contrib and non-free in your sources.list file, you will never get any contrib or non-free software and yours system will be fully free software. That's good enough for me, even though it's not good enough for RMS.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
You appear to have confused "testing" and "unstable."
They are astonishingly rude and confrontational in an entirely unproductive way. Sure it's probably unfair to point the finger at Debian alone (especially on /. - oh the irony) but I can say with some certainty that nothing positive will come from that thread. Conflict resolution amongst egotistical (come on , we can admit it) geeks is damn difficult - especially when programmer opinions take on the form of religious zealotry (free vs. libre).
These are big changes, and many people are expressing that they felt misled with the "editorial changes" description of the vote in question. I am not going to get involved in an internal dispute, except to say that it is in the best interests of the project for the majority not to feel manipulated and/or deceived. Again, I'm not saying they have been, I am saying that is what some are expressing.
Q.
Insert Signature Here
Just thought I'd clear the confusion here... I saw some of you guys refer to sarge as "unstable" and sid as "testing".....this is not the case. the correct names are: stable=woody- for production servers (current stable release) sarge=testing - this you run on your home machine sid=unstable -you dont want to run this because it breaks almost every day trust me, backing out of a dist upgrade to unstable is a painfull and involved process.
Here's some context for people who don't follow Debian matters habitually.
.WAD went into non-free because its license forbade modification. However, some controversy has arisen in the last few years due to two developments: first, the FSF started using a new license (the "GNU Free Documentation License") for its documentation; more recently, there has been a trend for hardware manufacturers to require drivers to upload binary firmware code upon initialization.
/. article is a post from the Release Manager indicating that he is changing his policy as a result of the GR. Until now, certain things that were unambiguously non-free, but where it was felt that the non-freeness was either not a regression (ie, they were non-free before and we didn't realize it and distributed them anyway), or where it would cause significant disruption to force the non-free item out of main (for instance, binary firmware), were being allowed to remain in Debian main until the release of sarge. Assuming that this message was sent in good faith, Anthony is indicating that he honestly believes that this was not previously a pragmatic exception to the Social Contract, and that no such pragmatic exception is possible now. Thus, he is now holding up the release until all this non-free stuff gets removed from main.
Debian has a document called the DFSG, or Debian Free Software Guidelines. These guidelines are used to determine whether software included in Debian is free: they require that the software be freely distributable, freely modifiable, etc. Stuff that doesn't meet these guidelines doesn't go on the CD images and is segregated into the "non-free" section of the archive; this policy is enshrined in Debian's Social Contract. More contextual information on the DFSG and its application is available here.
Now, historically, these guidelines have been applied to everything distributed by Debian. For instance, the Doom shareware
Despite its name, the "GNU Free Documentation License" turned out not to meet the DFSG (you can read some unofficial explanations [URL redacted because I believe the author wishes to keep it private for the time being; I will post it later if he tells me it's ok; I'll badly summarize it by saying that Invariant Sections are the major issue but not the only problem]). Because this license was applied to documentation of large packages, such as libc and Emacs, because it claimed to be "Free", and because it was published by the FSF, some people felt that Debian should find a way to distribute software under this license in "main" even though it was clearly non-free according to the DFSG. The typical argument advanced to support this position was that "documentation is not software, so it doesn't need to meet the DFSG". This argument relied on an ambiguity in the meaning of the word "software": it can mean either "anything that's not hardware", or "sequences of instructions to be executed on the host microprocessor".
The firmware issue is somewhat different; there were some recent arguments on the debian-devel mailing list over whether binary firmware that is uploaded by an otherwise free driver should be moved to non-free. I haven't followed this as closely, and it only came up in the last month or two. (well, it has been discussed in the past, but the first serious discussion I'm aware of is in the last month or two)
The amendment that was recently passed changes the text of the Social Contract to make it clear that everything in the Debian archives (not just executable programs) should meet the DFSG. This was intended to settle the GFDL question once and for all.
The message referenced by this
Discussion is ongoing on several Debian lists, and I don't think it's appropriate to make assumptions about the final outcome until things have settled down again.
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
And here, I do the following to upgrade or install a package:
dpkg -i foo.deb;
Or:
aptitude update && aptitude upgrade;
Finally, if I need to build and something from source, it's as simple as:
There's nothing magical there at all. The rules file calls make in the build target, and everything else happens automatically. [Now, if you don't know how to modify a make file, perhaps you shouldn't be building stuff from source?]
http://www.donarmstrong.com