Thomas Goirand <z...@debian.org> writes: > Sorry, WHAAAT ? That's shocking to read this from the DPL. > Are you sure you didn't do a mistake in this sentence?
> There's absolutely no problem within the Debian project to forbid using > non-free software. I use a computer with non-free firmware and push my packaging repositories to (among other places) GitHub. Should I therefore not be allowed to do Debian work? It's that sort of tool that Sam is talking about. This is not new. This is the reason the FSF has at times been mildly irritated with us: we are willing to make compromises to get Debian to run on the computers that people actually have, instead of refusing to reference anything other than software that can only run on a tiny handful of machines, as much as we would love for more purely free-software devices to exist. I feel like interacting with GitHub *among others* (my primary packaging repositories are on my own personal infrastructure) is in the same vein, and in the same spirit as the FSF being willing to support porting of their software to Solaris back in the day. If free software is a closed world only usable by people who are already devoted to free software, we will fail as a political movement. Even with that disagreement and their additional level of purity here, the FSF still has not achieved the goal if not using any non-free tools or non-free software, given that they're still using Intel and AMD processors, which *absolutely* contain non-free software. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
