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: Debian needs you

aqy6633@acf5.nyu.edu (Alex Yukhimets)  wrote on 01.11.97 in <m0xRohP-00045lC@localhost>:

> Surely we must have the criteria for the software being eligible to be
> included into the main distribution. And let's call those criteria DFSG.
> But let's understand that DFSG is not a bible. DFSG serves some goals, and
> the means of attaining these goals may and should change as time goes by.

Here's a fundamental difference, I think. A large part of the DFSG, IMO,  
doesn't _serve_ goals, it _describes_ those goals.

That is, the means may change, but those parts of the DFSG surely should  
NOT, because that would be a change in goals, not in means.

As a particularly obvious example, take the non-discrimination clause.  
That one is clearly a goal, not means to attain some other goal!

> Another question is our relationships with non-DFSG compliant software.
> Treating it as an enemy is plain *wrong*. And this is the most frustrating
> (for me) part of the dogmatic approach we happend to wittness recently.

Well ... no. While a word like "enemy" is surely too large to describe the  
situation, sometimes, non-free software really is a serious problem, and I  
don't think there's anything dogmatic about that.

OTOH, the approach taken by some people to address this problem has, at  
times, surely been ... umm ... suboptimal. Like Bruce's first reaction to  
the KDE CD.

However, I believe this is much more a question of strategy than of dogma.  
The goals (wrt freeness of software), or at least a large part of them,  
are in the DFSG; the question is how to best reach those goals.

It seems clear that basing KDE on Qt is a real problem in this regard.  
OTOH, it seems _also_ clear that antagonizing the KDE guys won't help us -  
it's too late to affect their original choice, and it's not their license  
that's the problem, and they already seem to understand the problem.

One thing I think we don't do often enough, at least in this area, is  
looking at the long-term view - and how to get there from here.

MfG Kai


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