On Sat, Oct 15, 2016 at 03:40:10PM +0100, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote: > On 10/15/16, mdn <[email protected]> wrote: > > Debian's approach of this isn't really ethical. > > they're doing the best that they believe they can do, but they _have_ > been told. see joey hess's very public description of the Debian > Charter as a "toxic document". > > i've spoken to the FSF about this: from what i gather, the changes > required are actually very very simple: all they have to do is add in > a simple popup message whenever someone clicks the "nonfree" section, > issuing a warning to the end-user that the consequences of their > actions are leading them into unethical territory. >
Debian and the FSF have agreed to differ on this: Debian folk have problems with GFDL with invariant sections, for example. Ask John Sullivan what the FSF posiiton is. Non-free is NOT a part of Debian, nor is contrib - but they are provided as a covenience for users. It's also worth knowing that security updates for non-free are almost impossible. BUT ... If you've got a Broadcom chipset, for example, you may have no option but to use proprietary software. Most Intel wifi chips also require firmware - what are you going to do when that's emebedded in a new laptop / nettop ? They repostiories do have to be explicitly enabled: the question of whether you want to install non-free software is asked explicitly in the installer - so the notifications are there. Ironically, if wifi adapters / Ethernet cards still came with burnt-in firmware, Debian would be a fully free distribution (and it's worth remembering that Debian was endorsed and funded by the FSF for a while). If you want any architecture other than Intel / AMD as a primary supported architecture then your choice is prety much Debian from the mainstream distributions and Trisquel / GNewsense are forks which don't yet support all other architectures. So, if you want to do work to enable your project on a Cubietruck - you use Debian, probably. Andy C NOT SPEAKING FOR DEBIAN PROJECT AS A WHOLE :) > ... how simple would that be to add? > > the other parts (creating separate DNS names and different > repositories for the nonfree sections) could be done transparently > with HTTP rewrites and redirects (just like devuan seems to be doing) > as an interim measure, then removed at some appropriate point after a > couple of major releases. > > it's really, really not very hard, and we'd end up with Debian - one > of the world's leading Software Libre OSes - being RYF Compliant. > > as it is, we have to fuck around forking tens of THOUSANDs of > packages, with efforts to do so failing under the sheer weight of the > task and the required resources. > > i really really wish the debian group would wake up, just a little bit. > > *sigh*. > > l. > > _______________________________________________ > arm-netbook mailing list [email protected] > http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/arm-netbook > Send large attachments to [email protected] _______________________________________________ arm-netbook mailing list [email protected] http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/arm-netbook Send large attachments to [email protected]
