(Not speaking on behalf of ctte) On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 09:05:08PM +0000, [email protected] wrote:
> The maintainer, Jeremy Bícha, has declined to address the core issue, > that a default-enabled fundraising notification violates Debian Social > Contract Clause 4: "We will be guided by the needs of our users and > free software community. We will place their interests first." > > This feature imposes an external agenda (GNOME Foundation fundraising) > without user consent, undermining user autonomy and Debian’s ethical > foundation. It is not a minor usability concern, but a policy and > philosophical violation, analogous to Bug #964359 (SMPlayer donation > nag), which was patched out due to reputational risk. Clause 4 says "We will be guided by the needs of our users and *the free software community*", and also goes on to describe specific ways in which we will satisfy those needs. So, firstly, I don't thing reading a subsection of clause 4 is helpful - it needs to be read in the context of the entire clause. But secondly, it does not prioritise users over the free software community at large. If a portion of the community requires funding to continue their work, is removing a request for donations not denying their needs? It's also not clear to me how different this is from the citation request in GNU Parallel, or why this is clearly something that has any impact on our user needs at all. Some users may prefer not to see the request, but some users would prefer that a lot of the software we ship acts in different ways, and we have certainly never felt that there's an obligation on the maintainer to satisfy those preferences. I don't see a clear violation of the social contract or policy here, and so right now would not be inclined to overrule the maintainer. If you feel that policy is failing to embody a clear reading of the social contract and that donation requests should be banned from Debian in general, the appropriate way to handle this is likely to propose changes to policy and build broad consensus for that change to be implemented.
