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: new definition of non-free

In article <Pine.LNX.3.96.970724161538.668A-100000@cantor.unex.es> you wrote:

: Do we maintain packages for which we do not have source code???
: Why don't we just get rid of them?

I maintain one of these sourceless packages, so let me try to explain why I do
it.

I maintain xtrkcad, which is in the contrib tree for hamm.  It is a binary-only
program for designing model railroad layouts.  This is a niche application,
and the fact that the author was willing to provide an executable for Linux
in addition to Windows is worthy of some level of support.  The version that 
I packaged has no distribution restrictions... but it limits the size of the
layout you can design.  For anyone who's serious about model railroading, he
has an easy process to pay for a key that unlocks the rest of the program's
capabilities.  This is somewhere between "shareware" and "crippleware" in the
global scheme of things, but with absolutely no distribution restrictions on
the binary that's included in the package.

: I don't see the point in having packages with no sources at all.

For some niche applications, at least, having the program at all, in a form
where there are no restrictions on distribution, is a whole lot better than
not having it.  I sure wouldn't build any dependencies on a package for which
source isn't available!  But, for an application like this, the only 
alternatives are even less free... for-fee programs in binary form only for
Win95, for example.  Nothing is likely to ever depend on this package, and
noone is likely to write a completely free alternative with sourcecode 
available, because it's a lot of work... and we have bigger fish to fry.

Some games might fall into the same category.  They aren't important for the
operation of a system, but they are nice to have around sometimes.  If they
break or go away at some point, noone is hurt... but you can enjoy them a lot
in the meantime.

I'm a strong believer in our free software guidelines, and don't want them
violated in the main distribution... but I see value, and no harm, in having
some packages like xtrkcad around in a contrib or non-free tree, and as part
of the Vitamin-D effort, etc.

Bdale


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