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:"Social Contract" [anti-trust]

> I have reformatted the "social contract" and have added material
> suggested by Sven. Let's do a final pass on this document, and then
> hold a final vote to ratify it. Comments, please?

It is much better now!

However, I think something is not made clear enough. Suppose Debian gets more
successful in the future and some company, say GreedSoft, takes Debian
and makes some proprietary modifications (for example, by reducing the
functionality but giving it a nicer look) and then sells their Debian-based
GreedSoft Windows as a proprietary product. Suppose that they give out
the source code of the modifications of GPL-ed software (they are required to)
but keep the rest secret. If they become a commercial success because of their
good looking interface, this could mean the end of Debian. They would have
"bought it out".

Why? Because Debian developers would be basically working for GreedSoft
for free, so they most likely would either be hired by GreedSoft or quit the
project.

One way to prevent this is, of course, the GPL infection. But a big part
of Debian is free non-GPL code which could be affected by a GreedSoft-like
offensive.

Note that the way the Guidelines are written now, they look as a way to 
protect us from uncooperative software authors who might want to impose
restrictions on commercially exploting their work.

That is OK, as long as we make it explicit that we want to protect free
software from both overzealous authors and greedy resellers.

We are not accepting restrictions made by the original authors. We should
prevent additional restrictions which Debian-based distributions might want
to impose on their modifications. Why should they be treated differently?

On the other hand, we want Debian to be used as a base for value-added
proprietary distributions. I think it is difficult to combine those
opposed goals, but it might be possible by adding some kind of anti-trust
clause. I do not have a good solution, but I think it should read like:

Anti-trust clause
-----------------

While respecting the copyright and license terms of each component of the
Debian distribution, we claim ownership of the distribution as a whole
and reserve the right to restrict its use by any party which damages
the Project's image or its goals, as decided by us.
In particular, we will not allow Debian-based distributions which contain
proprietary enhancements to an important part of Debian.

Maybe we have to specify what we mean by distribution as a whole, but I
remember that when Caldera was based on Red Hat they used a clause like
that. I'll try to find my ancient Caldera CD-rom.

One easy way might be claiming ownership of the ".deb" format and layout,
which we license for free to "anyone with good intentions" (whose goals are
compatible with Debian's.) Ownership of dpkg is not enough (one can use
"ar"...)

Thanks,
	Fernando


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