On Thu, Sep 28, 2000 at 02:18:44PM -0500, Ean R . Schuessler wrote: > To return to the crux of the biscuit, article 1 of the social contract > says that commercial software will not be part of the "distribution", > period. Five then says that we will offer commercial software via FTP, > those concepts seem to be fundamentally at odds.
Actually, section 5 does NOT say that we will offer commercial software via FTP. As an example of what falls in the category covered by section 5, which is not commercial: if we have some software that has a "you can have the source, and you can give away the source or binaries for free, but you can't distribute modified source without special permission" license -- especially if they've given Debian special permission -- that would go in non-free. Also, for this context, section 1 basically says that we won't make anything in our distribution depend on stuff in non-free. [Which means that stuff in contrib, which depends on stuff in non-free, should never be a part of our official distribution -- it shouldn't be on our official cdroms.] Finally, if FTP really becomes obsolete, that doesn't contradict section 5. However, FTP is no more obsolete than SMTP. [It doesn't represent the majority of traffic on the internet, but people still use it for quite a lot.] -- Raul
