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: CALL FOR VOTES: First of two votes on social contract



On Fri, 6 Jun 1997, J.H.M.Dassen wrote:

> I agree that a social contract is important; I agree with the intentions
> behind the current text, however, upon rereading the text, I think that the
> following paragraph should be reformulated in a more positive fashion:

> > We will be guided by the needs of our users and the free-software
> > community. We will put their interests first, heeding the needs of other
> > interests such as commercial software manufacturers only when that is
> > important to fulfill our users needs.
> 
> Putting myself in the position of a commercial software manufacturer, it
> is all too easy to read this as "keep out". 

Well, I don't read it that way, even with my "commercial hat on". What it
says is that the user of the software takes precedents over someones
interests in profit. This is a priciple tenent of the "free software
ideal".

>                                            One of the complaints I often
> see on Usenet about Debian is the lack of supported commercial software
> compared to Red Hat or Caldera.
> 
The reasons for this will be obvious to anyone reading this declaration.
RedHat/Caldera is a commercially supported distribution. It has as one of
its principle goals, providing a Linux distribution to host commercial,
proprietary, products.
While Debian does not now, and should never in the future, impede the use
of Debian in a commercial indeavor (this is actively encouraged in other
sections of this declaration) the desire is to keep development goals
focused on providing the end user the most versatile Linux distribution
available, not catering to needs for financial profit.
This document should be making those distinctions very clear, not warm and
fuzzy.

> I suggest to replace this paragraph by something like
> : We will be guided by the needs of our users and the free-software
> : community. We realize that the needs of our (potential) users include
> : software and services which the free software community cannot currently
> : provide. In order to address those needs, we will cooperate with
> : commercial software manufacturers in making their products available on
> : Debian systems, and we welcome their input. 
> 
Although your statement is more "friendly" to commercial needs, but
contains negative statements about free software. Yes, there are
commercial products that provide functionality in a Linux environment not
provided by free software. I see no reason to provide unpaid advertising
of that fact in a document that is trying to make a positive statement
about the advantages of free software.

> That we resolve conflicts of interest in the best interests of our users and
> the free-software community, is a natural consequence of this formulation,
> which IMO need not be stated explicitly.
> 
I think we need to point out clearly that free software welcomes value
added products with more limited licensing but we should also make it
clear that we are not interested in technical changes whose sole purpose
it to make someones proprietary software work better, so it will sell
better. Our efforts should never be diverted in this fashion and we should
make that point very clear.

Luck,

Dwarf
-- 
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aka   Dale Scheetz                   Phone:   1 (904) 656-9769
      Flexible Software              11000 McCrackin Road
      e-mail:  dwarf@polaris.net     Tallahassee, FL  32308

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