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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."
Release one version with the new contract next year, and one without it sooner? Call it sarge- and sarge+.
Who the hell uses the 2.6 kernel in a production setting? I know I don't. In fact, I vastly prefer to admin servers on debian because finding updated packages is typically EASIER than on Redhat without a support contract. Some server admins prefer the slower moving target of debian releases and the ease of backports.org for packages they NEED upgraded.
i use and like debian. but i want new packages to be released, and for it to generally appear to be supported.
if you dont want non-free stuff, fine, release sarge, its almost ready (and long delayed) and make removal of non free packages a goal of the next release.
See http://www.debian.org/devel/constitution, in particular sections #4 and A.
As more and more pieces of hardware will be protected by the ever-intensifying "intellectual property" laws, Debian will get more and more worthless. It's quite simple: In the distant past, manufacturers made specs available to those who asked. Then they stopped doing it, but you could reverse-engineer them. Then a few of them succumbed to commercial pressure (and the desire to look like "nice guys" to geeks who might influence corporate purchasing decisions) and released binary-only, proprietary drivers for the most popular Linux distro(s) (read: Red Hat and, if you're lucky, Mandrake and/or SuSE). Now most companies don't even bother doing that, and there is a growing trend towards the use of wrappers and such around Windows (!!!) DLL-based drivers. Linux's future is one of proprietary drivers and payware wrappers around proprietary Windows drivers.
.DLLs. Mplayer (that favourite of rebellious geeks) uses Windows .DLLs. Am I forgetting any similar projects? And the kernel is full of various drivers (think sound drivers) which ask for proprietary pieces of firmware, right? I suppose the Debian folks are going to rip out support for all of these devices?
... well, and Windows itself. Way to go, guys.
And the Debian people are rejecting this sort of thing because of their morals. That's really great. It's also, unfortunately, a wonderful way to ensure that Debian only has primitive, reverse-engineered, DMCA-illegal, flaky support for newer hardware.
Let's see. nVidia and ATI both have proprietary binary-only drivers for Linux (which of course ONLY work on Linux/x86, not Linux/PPC or Linux/ARM or Linux/SPARC or whateverthehell), right? DriverLoader is required to use a bunch of WiFi chipsets under Linux, using Windows
I LIKE the Debian project's inherent sense of morality. I DON'T like their ridiculous lack of pragmatism. This sort of antic is only going to drive off more moderate users towards the likes of Fedora (bloatbloatbloat), Lindows^WLinspire (Windows wannabe, bloat), and
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
I think that the Debian people are right on this one , however the FSF foundation is partly to blame because of the invariant sections in the FDL . (why glibc wont have documentation)
I think the solution, since non-free is being kept, should be to include the non-free repositories in the default "sources.list" file and allow tasksel to use non-free packages for documentation under a "Non-Free documentation" header, no non-free stuff should needed for the bootstrap installation(although binary kernel module won't be available by default). Thats the best comprimise, IMHO.
Could we stop the Microsoft, Debian, Gentoo and Fedora, and *BSD astroturfing please?
Did Glenn Beck rape and kill a girl in 1990? gb1990.com
Now we need a logo for open-source hardware, so people know what to buy. Preferably one designed by a competent icon designer, like Susan Kare.
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!").
Businesses use Redhat because they offer commerical support, something I don't believe Debian offers, as Debian is not a commercial enterprise.
I certainly see your point that for some popular devices (e.g. nVidia cards), the proprietary drivers are much better than the open ones. I also agree that going the moral road will turn away some users.
/etc, /dev, and /proc are set up just right.
However, Debian is imho big enough to pull this sort of thing. If some micro-league, half-assed distro went this route, it would die in obscurity, but a major product like Debian will survive. Furthermore, by rejecting proprietary firmware and documentation, Debian is raising awareness of some important issues (like Fedora not including mp3 support raises awareness of patent encumbered technologies).
Say you get a shiny new pci card with a little tux on the box, and a proprietary driver on the CD. Cool, huh? No. Not cool. The driver will work with your Linux system provided:
-you use kernel 2.4 or maybe 2.6
-you compiled said kernel with gcc 3.2 or 3.3
-you use glibc 2.somethingorother
-your
Years pass. Linux gains 20% desktop market share. Duke Nukem Forever is released for Mac and Lintel. You fish out an old computer from your closet; you want to install a Linux (kernel 3.0; compiled with gcc 3.5; with glibc 2.somethingelse; and a GNU/Darwin directory layout) to turn into a streaming virtual reality server for your apartment. Guess what's the probability of your closed-source driver still working?
Open source drivers might be a hassle to use in the short term, but C source is still the most portable way to distribute software.
It is true that the "apt" part of debian -- a modular packaging system with dependencies that are carefully expressed and automatically installed -- is a beautiful thing, and that other distros have similar tools.
However, even just looking at the practical (rather that philosophical) side, apt is not the best part of Debian.
The best part of Debian is a set of packaging conventions (the Debian Policy Manual), and a set of tools and a QA system to support that system, with the result that the software you use from Debian is consistently well-integrated, even though it is crafted by a distributed group of volunteers.
The social norms and continual build-up and exposition of best practices, expressed in part by the Debian Policy Manual, is really the best practical characteristic of Debian.
The freedom thing (and corresponding attention to software licensing) is nice, too.
(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
That's it... I'm giving up on Debian. I know they mean well but some users just want a stable system that has had application updates since 1994. I agree with the ideology of their actions, I think the unfree documenation should be removed from the project. But that should be a project goal for the next release, because we were nearly ready for one in the coming months.
It's sad, because the idea of a community driven project is noble, and I hate to see it fail. But this is failure -- they have abandoned their release goals and further postponed an already rediculously overdue rlease. They just aren't serious about maintaining a stable release, and thus I'm not going to take them seriously.
Not that they owe me anything -- I appreciate all the hard work that the Debian Developers do. But this is just the last straw...
501 Not Implemented
Debian has decided to change the codename of the next release to GNU/Longhorn.
Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect. -- Linus Torvalds
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!