The biggest reason for my most recent proposal is to make the social contract say what it is that we've been doing in the context of non-free.
However, I've addressed a number of more minor problems [for example, removing references to specific technologies, such as "GNU/Linux", "FTP" and "CDs", and making the social contract reflect the structure assigned to it by the most recent constitutional amendment]. Writing this proposal has been a group effort, and any mistakes are mine. We've been asymptotically approaching what the contract should actually say -- I hope that this proposal won't need to be updated again, but I can't guarantee it. If you can see a flaw in the proposal, please let me know, and suggest an improvement. [Sven has suggested that we alert users to the status of free replacements for non-free software, and while the social contract doesn't mandate this, it certainly allows for it -- so I'm not going to leave the social contract the way it is on that point.] If you can see no flaws in the proposal, and think it would be a significant improvement over our current social contract, please second it. Five seconds will be needed before the proposal can be introduced. If you sincerely believe, for example, that users must be protected from themselves by forcing them away from Debian if they have requirements for non-free software (3270 users come to mind), then you needn't support this proposal -- Andrew already has a proposal which satisfies that world view. However, you might want to work with him on integrating his minor cleanups with the more substansive part of that proposal. [I understand that some people might have other reasons for supporting Andrew's proposals, if you feel that my above example reason is unfair, please feel free to describe the problems you see that need to be solved.] Finally note: unless we change the DFSG to allow distribution of some worthy unchangeable software components, or unless GNU changes the GFDL, GNU documentation appears to only be distributable in non-free. If we remove non-free we will apparently not be able to distribute that documentation. Thanks, -- Raul
