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Debian Project Nominations Opened
robstah writes "The Debian project have announced the opening of nominations for this year's Debian Project Leader (DPL) elections. The first nomination, that of Matthew Garrett (of Dasher fame) has also been announced on Debian Planet."
Other than maybe Eben Moglen, I can't think of anyone who would defend the purity of Debian more strongly than Richard Stallman. The Debian project has always been about providing a Free operating system that works great rather than a semi-Free operating system. This is in line with RMS's original goal of Hurd (which is booting now!).
Let Freedom ring!
Sounds like democracy on steriods. large projects need benevolent dictators!
I'm a little intrigued that the project leader position appears to only be open to developers. Perhaps it's done to ensure that the leader is aware of all of the complications involved at lower levels, but I have to wonder if it's always best to have a project led by one of the foot soldiers.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Sigh, the folks who modded this funny have obviously never used Debian Sid for awhile.
Look, for cryin' out loud people, there are people like me who been running on Debian Sid (unstable) for YEARS. At least 5 so far, long enough that I can't even keep track, and in all that time I can count the number of serious problems on just one hand (and yes, I only have 5 fingers per hand just like all other humans).
All it takes is some common sense to have great stability with the up2date software you want. The rule is really simple, if a little heretical: DON'T USE APT-GET. Use aptitude; upgrade what you need and keep everything else on hold until upgrades are forced because of dependencies. Don't bloody update everything everyday, thats just asking for trouble. Only upgrade on significant version changes, don't upgrade large packages when they first hit debian.org, wait 24-48 hours and see if anything bad shakes out. Really people, its not that hard.
Sorry, for the tissy response, but those of us who KNOW FROM EXPERIENCE that Debian Sid is not "broken" are getting really tired of the lame jokes.
Several GNU manuals include the GNU Manifesto as an invariant section -- in fact, I can't back this up, but it certainly appears that the main motivation for the invariant section clause was specifically to prevent people from removing the GNU Manifesto from GNU manuals.
As others have said, there are quite a few onerous and ambiguous clauses in the GFDL; it's not all about invariant sections. Some of these seem to be mere bugs in the license text, rather than in the intent. Others, like the requirement to cram the whole text of the GFDL onto anything (even, say, a reference card) derived from GFDL'd works, are annoying but not necessarily non-free.
Certainly, the non-modifiable sections of a GFDL work cause the most fear and loathing. If you really think none of those problems could happen in practice, please see this message for a scenario I find very believable.
Creative Commons (in particular the Attribution license) seems to have its heart in the right place. Depending on whom you ask, there are a few "bugs" in that one too, but they seem to be relatively minor nits. As such, there is hope that the Debian legal eagles can negotiate with Creative Commons to iron out problems for future editions of the CC licenses. Certainly the two groups are talking to each other.
Meanwhile, there's no reason you can't use your code license for documentation -- be that the GPL, or some BSD-like thing, or what have you.
Consensus seems to be that the GFDL has enough problems that even without invariant sections, it's not a free license. As such, the convenience to the user doesn't outweigh sticking to principles of freedom. Just as it did not in the case of Netscape 4.x, which was by far the best graphical web browser for Debian platforms in its day, but didn't ship with source code. If users want manuals, they'll have to point their /etc/apt/sources.list at the non-free section of the archive. In practice, including "non-free" in your downloads is really no inconvenience at all, unless you've only got Debian CDs and no net access, and the CD vendor chose not to include documentation packages from non-free. (This is something a vendor can choose to do, if they wish to take the trouble to comb through the non-free archive to see what they can legally ship at all.)
Curiously enough, practical problems of documentation are mitigated a little bit by a completely unrelated issue. The GNU Project tends to spurn "man pages" as a documentation format, so most GFDL documents are other format documents, such as info pages. The Debian Project still likes man pages, so there are a number of contributed man pages in GNU packages in Debian which were not from the GNU upstream.
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
It was originally promised for Fall of 2003. After the last debian elections a commitment was made for October 2004. I can't remember if that was a code freeze or release. Regardless, the release has slipped.
Some developers are obviously frustrated. They have worked hard on their packages, and have even helped on other packages. Other developers simply don't care if Debian ever releases again.