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.
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: summary of non-free/contrib policy

On Tue, 29 Jul 1997, Bdale Garbee wrote:

> In article <Pine.LNX.3.96.970728200300.1040B-100000@klee> you wrote:
> 
> : graphics/xtrkcad_1.2.0-1.deb           yes?
> :        (very short license--not complete)
> 
> The text that is in the copyright file is the complete text provided by the
> author of the program.

It says:

   Copyright 1996 by Sillub Technology
   [snip]
   You may make copies of <XTrkCad> and associated files and freely
   distribute them, provided all files you receive are distributed.  

   You may <NOT> distribute the file <xtrkcad.key> or the information it 
   contains.

Is it allowed to use this program? Compared to GPL and similar licenses,
this is `very short' and `not complete'.

> There are no restrictions on distribution.  Source is not available.  It is
> therefore in contrib.

For now. But we consider such programs as `not free' these days (according
to the DFSG).

If I haven't missed lots of packages, there are only three (3) packages in
contrib that have no sources available. So this is really an `exception'.
I don't want to make policy complicated for `exceptions', unless
absolutely necessary.

> I object to changing the definition of contrib to exclude packages for which
> source is unavailable.

We are not talking about changing our policy just to `exclude packages for
which source is unavailable'. We are planning to do so to make destinction
between the distributions more clearly for everyone, maintainers, users,
and CD manufacturers.

> I think it is much more useful to distinguish between
> the two areas based on distribution restrictions, which has real meaning for 
> the consumers of this data... namely those who would further distribute it.  
> If the current names and definitions aren't clear, let's change the names... 
> but don't muck with the distinction. 

The problem is not that the names are unclear. The problem is that it's
too hard for the average maintainer to decide in which distribution a
package should go, since we don't have exact `rules' for
`freely-distributable' programs.

Simply changing the names of the distributions won't help here.


Thanks,

Chris

--          _,,     Christian Schwarz
           / o \__   schwarz@monet.m.isar.de, schwarz@schwarz-online.com,
           !   ___;   schwarz@debian.org, schwarz@mathematik.tu-muenchen.de
           \  /        
  \\\______/  !        PGP-fp: 8F 61 EB 6D CF 23 CA D7  34 05 14 5C C8 DC 22 BA
   \          /         http://fatman.mathematik.tu-muenchen.de/~schwarz/
-.-.,---,-,-..---,-,-.,----.-.-
  "DIE ENTE BLEIBT DRAUSSEN!"



--
TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to
debian-private-request@lists.debian.org . 
Trouble?  e-mail to templin@bucknell.edu .