Simon Josefsson <[email protected]> writes: > Wonderful -- it is good that I am able to finally express your view in a > way that you actually agree with.
Yes, thank you very much for your thoughtful and productive engagement in this thread! It's really satisfying to be able to talk about things that provoke strong feelings and be able to have a productive conversation that helps both people understand each other. I realize that in places I stated some views quite strongly or bluntly, and I really appreciate your willingness to read past that and understand what I was trying to express rather than the sometimes-flawed tone in which I expressed it. > I agree purity leads to cults and problems. My view of this situation > is that the Debian project is climbing up the stairs of the pragmatists' > ivory tower to the point where it suffers from the ills of purism: by > forbidding the free installer, the pragmatist becomes the mirror image > of a purist that wants to forbid everything that doesn't comply with its > own ideal. > In my mind, the pragmatic approch is to publish both the free and > non-free installer. So, spoiler, while I'm going to vote E first (I have a policy of only proposing ballot options I would vote first), my guess is that B is going to win for precisely the reasons you describe. I will certainly vote B above NOTA. (For full disclosure, my vote is likely E>B>C>A>NOTA>D.) In other words, I think we have a fair bit of common ground. My concern about having both installers is pragmatic; I don't think it's necessary and I think it's confusing to users (not to mention additional work that divides our efforts). But it's certainly not a violation of Debian's principles. My general policy for votes is that I'll vote my own principles and let everyone else vote theirs and rely on the voting system to reach compromises, but the compromise in B (and for that matter C) are both ones I'm happy with. I don't think having only one installer carries the message that you're seeing in it. I think it's just a more elegant and straightforward way of providing the user with a choice about whether to use non-free software and respecting that choice. But I completely understand how you arrived at the conclusion that you did and I respect your reasoning. In some ways it's probably more sound than mine. -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
