The debian-private mailing list leak, part 1. Volunteers have complained about Blackmail. Lynchings. Character assassination. Defamation. Cyberbullying. Volunteers who gave many years of their lives are picked out at random for cruel social experiments. The former DPL's girlfriend Molly de Blanc is given volunteers to experiment on for her crazy talks. These volunteers never consented to be used like lab rats. We don't either. debian-private can no longer be a safe space for the cabal. Let these monsters have nowhere to hide. Volunteers are not disposable. We stand with the victims.

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contrib, non-free and policy doubts



I've been reading the new version (2.1.3.2) of our policy manual, and have
found the definitions for contrib and non-free sections a little
disturbing.

As the manual says:

"2.2 non-free Section 

Packages 

  - whose copyright permission notices (or patent problems) do not allow 
    distribution and copying for profit, no matter how large or small the 
    amount is, or
  - where distribution is restricted according to the medium used, or
  - where the distributor must ask any kind of special permission of the 
    authors, or
  - with other onerous conditions,

may only be placed in the semi-supported non-free section..."

and

"2.3 contrib Section 

Packages 

  - whose copyright permission notices (or patent problems) allow only 
    distribution of compiled binaries (and thus of which only binaries are 
    available), or
  - where the source code which may be distributed is not the complete 
    source code required to compile the program (ie, the program cannot be 
    compiled using only packages in the main Debian distribution), or
  - which depend for their use on non-free or contrib packages[2], or
    allow free use only for a trial period (shareware), or
  - are demonstration programs lacking vital functionality (crippleware), or
  - are only installer-packages which require the user to supply a separate 
    file to be installed, or
  - which are buggy and no longer maintained, but are preserved for backward 
    compatibility, or
  - which fail to meet some other policy requirements,

may only be placed in the semi-supported contrib section of the Debian FTP 
archives (unless they need to be in non-free - see above)."

but AFAIK, packages where only compiled binaries can be distributed (no 
source code is available) are far from being free, and they should go in
non-free. The same applies to crippleware or shareware. None of those
are free software, so they should go in non-free. IMHO non-free is not
only a "non distributable for profit" section, is a political statement
("In Debian, we believe that software should be free").

Let me quote a paragraph from Bruce's proposed guideline for free software 
(posted to debian-devel on Sat, 26 Apr 97)

"5. The program must include source code, and must allow distribution in
   source as well as binary form. "

We should clarify this again, because there are a lot of packages living
in the wrong section, no matter which of the past or current versions of
the policy manual we apply, and it would be nice to know which of them 
must be moved.

-- 
Enrique Zanardi					ezanardi@noah.dfis.ull.es
Dpto. Fisica Fundamental y Experimental
Univ. de La Laguna


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