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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Re: Our social contract with the free-software community

On Jun 2, Bruce Perens wrote
> A few days ago someone brought up in personal email the matter of the
> "social contract" between Linux distribution makers and the Free Software
> community. I've taken the time to elucidate the social contract that Debian
> might provide it's community. Please read and comment.

Suggested additions/changes are in regular text; meta-comments/questions in
square brackets.

> We are Software In The Public Interest, producers of the Debian GNU/Linux
> system. This is the "social contract" we offer to the free software
> community.
> 
> We promise to keep our GNU/Linux system entirely free software.

As there are many interpretations of freedom in software, we include the 
guidelines we use in considering software free or not.

> We will support our users who develop and run non-free software on Debian,
> but we will never make the system depend on an item of non-free software. 
> 
> We will contribute to the free software world that provided the
> programs in our GNU/Linux system.

We will feed back bug-fixes, improvements, user requests etc. to the
"upstream" authors of software included in our system.
[something about our role inbetween user and upstream author; us acting as a
filter etc.]
We will keep a publically accessible bugtracking system to assist in this. 

> When we write new programs, we will license them as free software. We will
> produce the best free-software system we can, so that free software will
> be widely distributed and easily used.

[Valid point, but I think the one about feeding back into existing free
software is even more important.]

> 3. The license must not discriminate against any person or group of
>     persons unless their use would violate a law.
> 
> 4. The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program
>    in a specific field of endeavor where such use would not violate any
>    law. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in
>    a business, or from being used for genetic research.

["any law", "a law" is too general. We should specify the laws of which
country, or find a more acceptable formulation. E.g., I don't want 'tr' to
go out of our free system, because it can be used to implement ROT-13
encryption, which is forbidded by law in SomeCountry.]

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

[This does not cover software that comes with source code, but still cannot
be built using free software? (e.g. Motif programs prior to Lesstif)]

[Maybe cite GPL, LGPL, BSD-style, Artistic License as examples of what we
consider free?]

Ray
-- 
Cyberspace, a final frontier. These are the voyages of my messages, 
on a lightspeed mission to explore strange new systems and to boldly go
where no data has gone before. 


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