On Mon, Apr 26, 2004 at 02:56:09PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote: > So, if the technical committee would like to comment on this issue, > take the decision out of my hands, or overrule any decision I might > otherwise make, now would be a good time.
The technical committee can't override the constitution (nor foundation documents) any more than you can. However it might be worthwhile introducing a "Sarge Exception", making an explicit grandfather clause applicable only to sarge, and earlier distributions, so we can release the it. This is philosophically ugly, but then some people (perhaps RMS) think the same of debian as a whole. The language of that GR might run something like: In the past, we have had some disagreements between ourselves about what it is we're trying to do and what should go in a free distribution. We intend to fix those issues, going forwards, however to release the version of the distribution which we were about to release, it's going to have to include some components which might have been acceptable under our old social contract but which are definitely not acceptable under the new. We resolve to distribute the "Sarge Distribution" with packages licensed as they are currently licensed, even though these license conflict with the updated social contract. We'll also be providing in "Sarge" a document listing at least one such conflict for each of these packages. As an aside... or as a possibly related issue, consider glibc -- here is a piece of software which is licensed as free (though RMS might say that the LGPL licensed components aren't as free as he'd like), but which in practice is still distributed in almost-binary form (you can't build current versions of glibc on linux without having extremely current binaries because the version skew is so great). In essence, the preferred form for working with this software must include its binaries... anyways, I've not thought this all the way through, but parts of glibc are GPL'd software and there's some possibility that without the sarge exception we wouldn't be able to distribute glibc (or maybe any of the GPL licensed parts of the tool chain) in its current form. If RMS doesn't agree that this is some sort of problem, I'm not sure what position that leaves us in. Maybe we need to have an alternative "can be built and statically linked from source mini libc" explicitly for bootstrapping when building newer version of debian from older versions of debian, to avoid this quandry? [I can imagine this having some value in other contexts, but even a "mini-libc" can take an awful lot of work to get right -- not to mention the analogous work it would take to replace other core stuff available from the FSF which we have problems with.] -- Raul -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
