Ah, haven't seen that one. Nevertheless, it stands, if anything, as evidence that Bay's efforts will not--nay cannot--ruin TMNT. If the first, hugely-popular, utterly-commercialized cartoon series didn't ruin it, I think it's safe to say that nothing will.
"Never had huge commercial success"? The gawdawful cartoon, which completely ruined the comic, was totally huge in its day. All the "cool kids" had TMNT lunchboxes.
And things only went downhill from there. Pretty much every subsequent version was even worse than the original cartoon. I find it hard to imagine that there's anything left to ruin. I mean, maybe, if we were talking Uwe Boll....
Yes, but this had already been ruined by the time it first appeared on Saturday Morning TV. Star Trek actually managed to survive that experience. TMNT have been ruined permanently since the '80s, and nothing Michael Bey can do can possibly make it worse.
If Betelgeuse, very much in our galaxy, and quite visible to the naked eye even before it goes supernova, is no threat (and it's not, though it could go supernova any time in the next million years), why on Earth would we be worried about an explosion in another galaxy?
Supernova occur (and are observed) fairly regularly. The estimated rate of supernova production in a galaxy the size of the Milky Way is about one every 50 years. We know of millions of galaxies. It's always nice to catch one as it's occurring, especially one as close as this, but the summary is just ridiculous.
It doesn't sound to me like they're trying to penalize anyone; it sounds to me like they're trying to improve their search results. The people who spend so much time and effort trying to artificially boost their rankings may feel like they're being penalized, but that doesn't mean they are. You might as well say that a thief forced to return the goods he stole is being penalized for the value of those goods. While "stealing rankings" may not be a crime, per se, Google is doing little more here than trying to return rankings to their proper owners.
Heh, reminds me of the TVTropes Renamed Tropes entry for The Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: "used to be '...Versus Realism'. It was changed by idealists. To be fair, it was probably named by the cynics."
God I hope you're joking! Unfortunately, Poe's Law applies all-too-well here. But whether you meant it to be or not, that was pretty funny, so, if that was your intent, kudos!
(The actual definition of "liminal" adds to the piquancy of the humor.):)
Until we know why they were measured as travelling faster than light and can repeat it, the mystery remains.
That's not how science works, that's how pseudo-science and conspiracy theories work.
No, he's right. The original results are still a mystery. Not a very big one, since they were obtained with faulty equipment, but as I understand it, the discovered faults don't exactly match the necessary cause of the results obtained.
This isn't a ground-shaking scientific mystery--more like a "why does toast land butter-side down" bit of trivia. But it's something that could be investigated and explained (as the butter-side down question was). Of course, unlike toast, it's likely only of interest to the folks at OPERA.
There's no ground-breaking, theory-shattering, fundamental-physics mystery here, but there's still a mystery. A mundane technical mystery of faulty equipment and its possible failure modes.
I have actually read the Supreme Court's decision in Re Bilski, which is why I said "improbable" rather than, say, "impossible". The SC didn't exactly "throw out" the machine-or-transformation test; they merely refused to affirm it as necessarily sufficient in all cases.
The door is even technically still open for the test to be ruled sufficient in all cases. From page 9 of the decision (emphasis mine):
The machine-or-transformation test may well provide a sufficient basis for evaluating processes similar to those in the Industrial Age—for example, inventions grounded in a physical or other tangible form. But there are reasons to doubt whether the test should be the sole criterion for determining the patentability of inventions in the Information Age.
"Reasons to doubt" is a long way from saying "throw it out". Basically, the Supremes said that there may be a fourth category, other than machines or (physical) transformations (which are patentable) or abstract ideas (which are not). To demonstrate that a patent was valid after it failed the machine-or-transformation test, you would have to demonstrate the existence of such a fourth category, based on zero precedent. Not likely to be an easy feat. This is will be particularly difficult with pure-software patents, as pure software is purely mathematical, and mathematics has always been found to be a purely abstract idea.
You're also correct to say that these may not be pure software (another factor in my decision to use the word "improbable"), but given the nature of plaintiff and defendent, it seems quite unlikely.
Post Bilski, that seems pretty improbable. Much as I may despise Facebook and don't care one way or the other about Yahoo, I'm not going to concede that anything involving pure software can ever qualify as the basis for a legitimate patent suit.
They may be being polite. Good documentation is useful; bad documentation is not only useless, but often becomes a maintenance nightmare, if it documents the wrong things, or, especially, if it actively misleads those who come later. No documentation is generally preferable to bad documentation. So, your patches have to be audited, just like a patch containing code would. Which is extra work for someone who may have limited time for the project, and other priorities. Also, even if you say your patch is pure documentation, it still needs to be audited to make sure you're not trying to sneak in some code changes. A pure-documentation patch requires just as much work as a pure-code one. Maybe even more, because you don't just have to check what the code does--you've got to compare it to the code and make sure it's accurate and not actively misleading or pointless or dependent on irrelevant details of the implementation that are subject to change without notice.
Furthermore, the world is full of grammar nazis who believe the most absurd things about English (like, split infinitives are bad, or sentences shouldn't end with prepositions). America is in love with The Elements of Style, which Prof. Geoffrey Pullum of the University of Edinburgh describes as a "toxic mix of purism, atavism, and personal eccentricity [...] not underpinned by a proper grounding in English grammar. It is often so misguided that the authors appear not to notice their own egregious flouting of its own rules." I can't tell you how many times I've received patches from people "correcting" things that weren't wrong to start with. And that's not even counting the people who don't realize that American English and British English differ.
On top of that, churn is a real, albeit fairly minor, thing. If a problem crops up, you may need to juggle dozens of patches between several branches. Adding in lots of niggling little patches that don't actually affect the code (but do affect any attempts at automatic merging) can only complicate this. But that's such a minor issue overall that I can't help but feel there's more going on.
My advice? Start small. Open source development is a social activity. Get known by making small-but-useful contributions before attempting to send in that huge patch that modifies every file in the system, and don't be a dickwad. If the people involved know you and feel they can trust your judgement, they're far more likely to accept your contributions. And if the problem is really that the project is actually run by dickwads (which happens), find another one to contribute to. It'll be better for your sanity and everyone else's. Fuck 'em if they can't take a <strike>joke</strike> patch.:)
Really? So you couldn't get "MS doesn't need a rootkit because they already own your ass, sucker" out of it? I think you may be suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.:)
Yes it does. The fact that a stupid mistranslation of a latin phrase became generalized by the public doesn't mean that the generalization is any wronger than the original idiotic mistranslation. Either the phrase has no valid uses, or it has two.
Furthermore, the standard claim that "raises the question" serves just as well is clearly false. An interesting scientific result may raise a question, but you will never see anyone, no matter how informally they're speaking, describe it as "begging a question". As used by normal English speakers, the phrase "begs the question" almost invariably describes human behavior and motives, and seems to have a strong correlation with places where the phrase "he's begging for it" could be used.
Yes, the phrase certainly became popular in its common, standard form because of the idiotically mistranslated formal-logic term, but that doesn't make it "wrong" any more than bizarre formation misderived from technical (or not) terms. "Terrific" has other meanings than "causes terror", and "octopi" is accepted by dictionaries that never mention that the proper Greek plural would be "octopodes". English doesn't necessarily follow your narrow preconceptions. Get over it.
Yes. Yes I do. But I don't understand your comment. Are you trying to claim that the BMG rootkit was not a rootkit, or are you trying to put words in my mouth so you can argue with a strawman?
Yeah, people complain about the "Sony rootkit*", and ignore the fact that MS already had root on any machine that was vulnerable!:) Sony has done a lot of stuff to piss me off lately, and you know what? I still trust them more than I do MS.
On the other hand...I'm not sure I should really complain that hard about the Xbox. I mean, I've always said that MS should really be considered a toy maker, since none of their products are good enough to trust with anything real or important. So when they actually make a toy, I shouldn't complain, right? They're playing to their strength, for once!:)
* Actually, the rootkit came from BMG, which was still an independent company up until just before the kit was discovered.
Oracle and Adobe may not have been the best/most interesting examples. (I think the fact that Oracle has an extremely pricey "Platinum Membership", representing a half-million dollar investment, says all that needs to be said about that. They're clearly pretty serious about Linux, whatever the Linux or Slashdot community may think of them.)
Some really surprising names (at the Gold/100k USD level) are Nokia and Sony. They've invested as much as SUSE (the only pure-Linux player at the gold level) and Google. Of course, Sony is a big company, and just because their games division seems to hate Linux, that doesn't mean that the company overall isn't a huge user/supporter. As for Nokia...I got nuthin'....:)
Toyota is also a Gold Member, which is not as shocking as seeing Nokia or Sony on the list, but I still find it a little surprising that they're willing to sink six figures into general Linux support/promotion/defense. I had no idea they even used it. I certainly don't expect them to open-source their drivers. [Insert car analogy here.]:)
It means that they meet the requirements for membership* and have paid their membership fees. Which basically means they're throwing a bunch of money into a pool intended to promote, support, improve, and defend Linux and other OSS projects and developers. And getting a tax credit.
Does that mean [other stuff]?
No.
If no, then what's the meaning of joining?
It means that they've thrown a bunch of money into a pool intended to...blah, blah. And gotten a tax credit. And the right to say "Member of the Linux Foundation" on their website and other promotional materials.
* Membership is open to "...individuals and entities that engage in or support the production, manufacture, use, sale, or standardization of Linux or other open source-based technologies." (Emphasis mine.) Note that you don't even have to engage in the use of Linux--you merely have to support it (whatever that means).
Phrases like "2 out of every 5" implies quantizing to 20%.
On what planet? You might just as well claim that because they referred to 46% as "about one half", they were obviously "quantizing" to 50%. These are Earth-humans we're discussing here, not Vulcans. We here on Earth routinely simply our ratios without implying anything by it.
What's this "consistent quantum of 20%" nonsense? If you round to the nearest 10%, which is much more common, you get 40% and 50% percent, respectively. Now, if you were to express 40% as a ratio, what would be the most normal way to do so? That's right, two-fifths. Which is where the "fifths" comes from. To assume that that means that all the other ratios have to be expressed as fifths is silly. Nobody says "four-tenths". We automatically simplify that. But when it comes to 50%, we simplify that to...get ready for it...one half. Which is exactly what they did.
Other than that, though, your post was a good one. Except for that last question: obviously the remaining "nearly 20%" (or about 13%, which is closer to 10%) have no cell phone at all.
I think you misunderstand the disaster that's coming. When the Mayan calendar ends, all computers that use the Mayan calendar will crash, world-wide. Worse yet, unlike Y2K, where we were able to drag old Cobol programmers out of retirement to fix the problem, experts in Mayan computers are all extinct. So we're all doomed! Except for those of us who don't use Mayan computers.:)
So the Foundation framework isn't the same as the runtime? Ok, learn something new every day, I guess. I've never used objc as a language or a runtime, so sue me. (I did install gnustep once, and browsed the docs, but then removed it, as I wasn't enamored of the design.)
Not linked to the same binary. They implement a largely overlapping set of symbols. Linking both causes massive breakage.
Aha! So this is likely the reason why the package isn't included. Note that there are reasonable workarounds for such issues, but they take effort. If you're not willing to provide that effort yourself (which is reasonable, since you probably have enough on your plate already), then you're hardly in a position to criticize others for not taking that effort. You can, however, file a request on the Work Needed and Prospective Packages list and see if you can find someone interested, as I suggested before.
But the bottom line is still that this all has nothing to do with the licenses! I was a Debian developer for over a decade, and in all that time, nobody ever once suggested that we should choose one package over another simply because the one was GPL and the other was BSD or MIT.
Did you look at the list of files? libgnustep-base-dev clearly includes files like NSObject.h. Unless Debian went out of their way to write their own shims to reproduce the functionality of the GNUstep runtime based on the GNU objc runtime (which uses Object instead of NSObject), it seems far more likely to me that the GNUstep runtime is included in the libgnustep-base package. Both runtimes can co-exist just fine, to the best of my knowledge.
Yes, I'll admit that the linkage to libobjc2 is curious, but that may be nothing more than some minimal GCC-based dependencies on startup code or the like. I'll no longer assert with perfect certainty that your hypothesis is incorrect, but I still find it highly implausible.
But in any case, the bottom line is that even if the GNUstep runtime isn't included, it has absolutely nothing to do with the license. Unlike the FSF, the Debian project has absolutely no preference for any DFSG-license over another. If they aren't both there, it's most likely because nobody has taken the effort not only to package both but to make sure they can co-exist and cooperate smoothly and effortlessly. If that's the case, the first thing I would do is talk to the packagers, and find out what the issues are, then see if I can find someone who is willing to solve those issues. It doesn't even have to be a Debian developer--you only need a developer to audit the packages once they're ready, and sponsor the upload.
But first you should make sure you're correct, because, as I said, it seems extremely implausible.
Depends on whether they measured source packages or binaries, but the divisions into multiple binary packages based on a single source is in no way dependent on the license in any case. For a counterexample, look how many (binary) packages Xorg is split into.
Oh, and you're wrong about the GNUstep runtime--it's included as part of the gnustep libraries (probably libgnustep-base).
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, haven't seen that one. Nevertheless, it stands, if anything, as evidence that Bay's efforts will not--nay cannot--ruin TMNT. If the first, hugely-popular, utterly-commercialized cartoon series didn't ruin it, I think it's safe to say that nothing will.
"Never had huge commercial success"? The gawdawful cartoon, which completely ruined the comic, was totally huge in its day. All the "cool kids" had TMNT lunchboxes.
And things only went downhill from there. Pretty much every subsequent version was even worse than the original cartoon. I find it hard to imagine that there's anything left to ruin. I mean, maybe, if we were talking Uwe Boll....
Yes, but this had already been ruined by the time it first appeared on Saturday Morning TV. Star Trek actually managed to survive that experience. TMNT have been ruined permanently since the '80s, and nothing Michael Bey can do can possibly make it worse.
If Betelgeuse, very much in our galaxy, and quite visible to the naked eye even before it goes supernova, is no threat (and it's not, though it could go supernova any time in the next million years), why on Earth would we be worried about an explosion in another galaxy?
Supernova occur (and are observed) fairly regularly. The estimated rate of supernova production in a galaxy the size of the Milky Way is about one every 50 years. We know of millions of galaxies. It's always nice to catch one as it's occurring, especially one as close as this, but the summary is just ridiculous.
It doesn't sound to me like they're trying to penalize anyone; it sounds to me like they're trying to improve their search results. The people who spend so much time and effort trying to artificially boost their rankings may feel like they're being penalized, but that doesn't mean they are. You might as well say that a thief forced to return the goods he stole is being penalized for the value of those goods. While "stealing rankings" may not be a crime, per se, Google is doing little more here than trying to return rankings to their proper owners.
Heh, reminds me of the TVTropes Renamed Tropes entry for The Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: "used to be '...Versus Realism'. It was changed by idealists. To be fair, it was probably named by the cynics."
God I hope you're joking! Unfortunately, Poe's Law applies all-too-well here. But whether you meant it to be or not, that was pretty funny, so, if that was your intent, kudos!
(The actual definition of "liminal" adds to the piquancy of the humor.) :)
Until we know why they were measured as travelling faster than light and can repeat it, the mystery remains.
That's not how science works, that's how pseudo-science and conspiracy theories work.
No, he's right. The original results are still a mystery. Not a very big one, since they were obtained with faulty equipment, but as I understand it, the discovered faults don't exactly match the necessary cause of the results obtained.
This isn't a ground-shaking scientific mystery--more like a "why does toast land butter-side down" bit of trivia. But it's something that could be investigated and explained (as the butter-side down question was). Of course, unlike toast, it's likely only of interest to the folks at OPERA.
There's no ground-breaking, theory-shattering, fundamental-physics mystery here, but there's still a mystery. A mundane technical mystery of faulty equipment and its possible failure modes.
That's for wimps. Badasses use Shady URLs. I mean, how can you not feel good going to http://5z8.info/38--start.spamBot--this-ip--_s1h7hw_racist
I have actually read the Supreme Court's decision in Re Bilski, which is why I said "improbable" rather than, say, "impossible". The SC didn't exactly "throw out" the machine-or-transformation test; they merely refused to affirm it as necessarily sufficient in all cases.
The door is even technically still open for the test to be ruled sufficient in all cases. From page 9 of the decision (emphasis mine):
The machine-or-transformation test may well provide a sufficient basis for evaluating processes similar to those in the Industrial Age—for example, inventions grounded in a physical or other tangible form. But there are reasons to doubt whether the test should be the sole criterion for determining the patentability of inventions in the Information Age.
"Reasons to doubt" is a long way from saying "throw it out". Basically, the Supremes said that there may be a fourth category, other than machines or (physical) transformations (which are patentable) or abstract ideas (which are not). To demonstrate that a patent was valid after it failed the machine-or-transformation test, you would have to demonstrate the existence of such a fourth category, based on zero precedent. Not likely to be an easy feat. This is will be particularly difficult with pure-software patents, as pure software is purely mathematical, and mathematics has always been found to be a purely abstract idea.
You're also correct to say that these may not be pure software (another factor in my decision to use the word "improbable"), but given the nature of plaintiff and defendent, it seems quite unlikely.
Post Bilski, that seems pretty improbable. Much as I may despise Facebook and don't care one way or the other about Yahoo, I'm not going to concede that anything involving pure software can ever qualify as the basis for a legitimate patent suit.
They may be being polite. Good documentation is useful; bad documentation is not only useless, but often becomes a maintenance nightmare, if it documents the wrong things, or, especially, if it actively misleads those who come later. No documentation is generally preferable to bad documentation. So, your patches have to be audited, just like a patch containing code would. Which is extra work for someone who may have limited time for the project, and other priorities. Also, even if you say your patch is pure documentation, it still needs to be audited to make sure you're not trying to sneak in some code changes. A pure-documentation patch requires just as much work as a pure-code one. Maybe even more, because you don't just have to check what the code does--you've got to compare it to the code and make sure it's accurate and not actively misleading or pointless or dependent on irrelevant details of the implementation that are subject to change without notice.
Furthermore, the world is full of grammar nazis who believe the most absurd things about English (like, split infinitives are bad, or sentences shouldn't end with prepositions). America is in love with The Elements of Style, which Prof. Geoffrey Pullum of the University of Edinburgh describes as a "toxic mix of purism, atavism, and personal eccentricity [...] not underpinned by a proper grounding in English grammar. It is often so misguided that the authors appear not to notice their own egregious flouting of its own rules." I can't tell you how many times I've received patches from people "correcting" things that weren't wrong to start with. And that's not even counting the people who don't realize that American English and British English differ.
On top of that, churn is a real, albeit fairly minor, thing. If a problem crops up, you may need to juggle dozens of patches between several branches. Adding in lots of niggling little patches that don't actually affect the code (but do affect any attempts at automatic merging) can only complicate this. But that's such a minor issue overall that I can't help but feel there's more going on.
My advice? Start small. Open source development is a social activity. Get known by making small-but-useful contributions before attempting to send in that huge patch that modifies every file in the system, and don't be a dickwad. If the people involved know you and feel they can trust your judgement, they're far more likely to accept your contributions. And if the problem is really that the project is actually run by dickwads (which happens), find another one to contribute to. It'll be better for your sanity and everyone else's. Fuck 'em if they can't take a <strike>joke</strike> patch. :)
Really? So you couldn't get "MS doesn't need a rootkit because they already own your ass, sucker" out of it? I think you may be suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. :)
No it doesn't.
Yes it does. The fact that a stupid mistranslation of a latin phrase became generalized by the public doesn't mean that the generalization is any wronger than the original idiotic mistranslation. Either the phrase has no valid uses, or it has two.
Furthermore, the standard claim that "raises the question" serves just as well is clearly false. An interesting scientific result may raise a question, but you will never see anyone, no matter how informally they're speaking, describe it as "begging a question". As used by normal English speakers, the phrase "begs the question" almost invariably describes human behavior and motives, and seems to have a strong correlation with places where the phrase "he's begging for it" could be used.
Yes, the phrase certainly became popular in its common, standard form because of the idiotically mistranslated formal-logic term, but that doesn't make it "wrong" any more than bizarre formation misderived from technical (or not) terms. "Terrific" has other meanings than "causes terror", and "octopi" is accepted by dictionaries that never mention that the proper Greek plural would be "octopodes". English doesn't necessarily follow your narrow preconceptions. Get over it.
Yes. Yes I do. But I don't understand your comment. Are you trying to claim that the BMG rootkit was not a rootkit, or are you trying to put words in my mouth so you can argue with a strawman?
Yeah, people complain about the "Sony rootkit*", and ignore the fact that MS already had root on any machine that was vulnerable! :) Sony has done a lot of stuff to piss me off lately, and you know what? I still trust them more than I do MS.
On the other hand...I'm not sure I should really complain that hard about the Xbox. I mean, I've always said that MS should really be considered a toy maker, since none of their products are good enough to trust with anything real or important. So when they actually make a toy, I shouldn't complain, right? They're playing to their strength, for once! :)
* Actually, the rootkit came from BMG, which was still an independent company up until just before the kit was discovered.
Oracle and Adobe may not have been the best/most interesting examples. (I think the fact that Oracle has an extremely pricey "Platinum Membership", representing a half-million dollar investment, says all that needs to be said about that. They're clearly pretty serious about Linux, whatever the Linux or Slashdot community may think of them.)
Some really surprising names (at the Gold/100k USD level) are Nokia and Sony. They've invested as much as SUSE (the only pure-Linux player at the gold level) and Google. Of course, Sony is a big company, and just because their games division seems to hate Linux, that doesn't mean that the company overall isn't a huge user/supporter. As for Nokia...I got nuthin'.... :)
Toyota is also a Gold Member, which is not as shocking as seeing Nokia or Sony on the list, but I still find it a little surprising that they're willing to sink six figures into general Linux support/promotion/defense. I had no idea they even used it. I certainly don't expect them to open-source their drivers. [Insert car analogy here.] :)
It means that they meet the requirements for membership* and have paid their membership fees. Which basically means they're throwing a bunch of money into a pool intended to promote, support, improve, and defend Linux and other OSS projects and developers. And getting a tax credit.
Does that mean [other stuff]?
No.
If no, then what's the meaning of joining?
It means that they've thrown a bunch of money into a pool intended to...blah, blah. And gotten a tax credit. And the right to say "Member of the Linux Foundation" on their website and other promotional materials.
* Membership is open to "...individuals and entities that engage in or support the production, manufacture, use, sale, or standardization of Linux or other open source-based technologies." (Emphasis mine.) Note that you don't even have to engage in the use of Linux--you merely have to support it (whatever that means).
Phrases like "2 out of every 5" implies quantizing to 20%.
On what planet? You might just as well claim that because they referred to 46% as "about one half", they were obviously "quantizing" to 50%. These are Earth-humans we're discussing here, not Vulcans. We here on Earth routinely simply our ratios without implying anything by it.
What's this "consistent quantum of 20%" nonsense? If you round to the nearest 10%, which is much more common, you get 40% and 50% percent, respectively. Now, if you were to express 40% as a ratio, what would be the most normal way to do so? That's right, two-fifths. Which is where the "fifths" comes from. To assume that that means that all the other ratios have to be expressed as fifths is silly. Nobody says "four-tenths". We automatically simplify that. But when it comes to 50%, we simplify that to...get ready for it...one half. Which is exactly what they did.
Other than that, though, your post was a good one. Except for that last question: obviously the remaining "nearly 20%" (or about 13%, which is closer to 10%) have no cell phone at all.
I think you misunderstand the disaster that's coming. When the Mayan calendar ends, all computers that use the Mayan calendar will crash, world-wide. Worse yet, unlike Y2K, where we were able to drag old Cobol programmers out of retirement to fix the problem, experts in Mayan computers are all extinct. So we're all doomed! Except for those of us who don't use Mayan computers. :)
So the Foundation framework isn't the same as the runtime? Ok, learn something new every day, I guess. I've never used objc as a language or a runtime, so sue me. (I did install gnustep once, and browsed the docs, but then removed it, as I wasn't enamored of the design.)
Not linked to the same binary. They implement a largely overlapping set of symbols. Linking both causes massive breakage.
Aha! So this is likely the reason why the package isn't included. Note that there are reasonable workarounds for such issues, but they take effort. If you're not willing to provide that effort yourself (which is reasonable, since you probably have enough on your plate already), then you're hardly in a position to criticize others for not taking that effort. You can, however, file a request on the Work Needed and Prospective Packages list and see if you can find someone interested, as I suggested before.
But the bottom line is still that this all has nothing to do with the licenses! I was a Debian developer for over a decade, and in all that time, nobody ever once suggested that we should choose one package over another simply because the one was GPL and the other was BSD or MIT.
Did you look at the list of files? libgnustep-base-dev clearly includes files like NSObject.h. Unless Debian went out of their way to write their own shims to reproduce the functionality of the GNUstep runtime based on the GNU objc runtime (which uses Object instead of NSObject), it seems far more likely to me that the GNUstep runtime is included in the libgnustep-base package. Both runtimes can co-exist just fine, to the best of my knowledge.
Yes, I'll admit that the linkage to libobjc2 is curious, but that may be nothing more than some minimal GCC-based dependencies on startup code or the like. I'll no longer assert with perfect certainty that your hypothesis is incorrect, but I still find it highly implausible.
But in any case, the bottom line is that even if the GNUstep runtime isn't included, it has absolutely nothing to do with the license. Unlike the FSF, the Debian project has absolutely no preference for any DFSG-license over another. If they aren't both there, it's most likely because nobody has taken the effort not only to package both but to make sure they can co-exist and cooperate smoothly and effortlessly. If that's the case, the first thing I would do is talk to the packagers, and find out what the issues are, then see if I can find someone who is willing to solve those issues. It doesn't even have to be a Debian developer--you only need a developer to audit the packages once they're ready, and sponsor the upload.
But first you should make sure you're correct, because, as I said, it seems extremely implausible.
"All advanced (i.e. - "city-building") ancient civilizations were based on slavery "
So the united states is an ancient civilization now?
Wow, blatant elementary logic 101 failure!
"All dogs are mammals."
"So a chimpanzee is a dog now?"
"All protons have a positive charge."
"So a positron is a proton now?"
"All ducks have bills."
"So the platypus is a duck now?"
"All people who post non-sarcastic logic fails on Slashdot look like fools."
"So Bozo the Clown* posts non-sarcastic logic fails on Slashdot now?"
* (Substitute politician-of-your-choice if you think it makes this funnier.)
Depends on whether they measured source packages or binaries, but the divisions into multiple binary packages based on a single source is in no way dependent on the license in any case. For a counterexample, look how many (binary) packages Xorg is split into.
Oh, and you're wrong about the GNUstep runtime--it's included as part of the gnustep libraries (probably libgnustep-base).