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:

> On Jun 6, Dale Scheetz wrote

> > 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. 
> 
> I don't agree that "we are not interested". I agree that this is not our
> primary interest. I think that this is something that needs to be judged on
> a per-case basis.

What I am not interested in is making technical changes to aid a
commercial marketing strategy. In striving for technical excelence
encouraging proprietary software to provide "extra" functionality is
completely within our desired goals.

> 
> E.g. suppose company XYZ produces a commerical XDM, and would like to make
> it available for Debian users. Now XDM is currently in xbase, and it is in
> XYZ's interest to see xdm in a separate package, for plug-in replacement.
> I don't want to send out to XYZ a message "don't even attempt to consider
> asking the X maintainer to split his package". What I want, is to send out a
> message to XYZ "Sure you can ask the X maintainer to split her package; we
> leave it up to her to decide whether or not it is in the interest of Debian
> and it's users to do so, under Debian's guidelines (esp. the social
> contract), and whether or not to actually do it".
> 
This is exactly the kind of "marketing" manuevering that I don't wish us
to get embroiled in. It is quite clear to me that the GPL is in place to
discourage the "take over" of any free software by a "proprietary vendor".
The scenario you suggest would provide avenues of attack for replacing
free software with proprietary replacements. Even if this manufacturer's
version of xdm were in some way superior to the free software version I
would be uninclined to encourage its replacement with a proprietary
version. As I said, the GPL is intended to protect us from that kind of
distructive activity.

Later,

Dwarf
-- 
_-_-_-_-_-_-                                          _-_-_-_-_-_-_-

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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