Pursuant to Appendix A of the Debian Constitution and the guidelines offered at http://www.debian.org/vote/howto_proposal, I hereby offer the following draft proposal as the beginning of a General Resolution process to decide this issue.
Sponsors should reply to this message. According to the guidelines, all other discussion is to occur in debian-devel, and I will start a thread there with some prelminary analyses of this proposal. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Resolved: A. That the non-free areas be removed from all non-released Debian archives, such as "unstable" and "testing". All packages placed in a non-free area in accordance with the definition in Policy section 2.1.4 must be removed from the Distribution and archives, subject to the restrictions in section B. The introduction or re-introduction into the Debian Distribution or the Debian archives of any package meeting the non-free definition in Policy section 2.1.4, or failing the Debian Free Software Guidelines, shall be forbidden. B. That nothing in this Resolution shall mandate the removal of non-free software from historic Debian archives nor from the current stable archive. The archive maintainers, release maintainers, or other responsible parties under the Debian Constitution shall decide the final disposition of the non-free software in historic and current stable areas. C. That nothing in this Resolution shall mandate the removal of "contrib" sections from any archive. The archive maintainers, release maintainers, or other responsible parties under the Debian Constitution shall decide the disposition of contrib sections, and may re-visit their decision at any later date, subject to the normal procedures governing such decisions. D. That the maintainer of the Debian Policy Manual, or an appointee of the Debian Project Leader, be directed to update that manual respective of the changes to the Project and general Project policy detailed in this Resolution. E. That the maintainers of the Debian archives and website, or an appointee of the Debian Project Leader, be directed to implement the changes to the Debian archives and website to reflect the changes to Debian enacted by this Resolution. F. That a new version of the Debian Social Contract with the Free Software Community be released, with the same content as the existing version, save for the following amendments: 1. The title of Section 5 shall be modified to read: "We will support users of our system who develop or run non-free software." 2. The text of Section 5 be modified to read: "We acknowledge that some of our users require the use of programs that don't conform to the Debian Free Software Guidelines. While we will not distribute such software itself, we will take steps wherever technically feasible to ensure compatibility with these programs." G. That the public will be advised of the date, purpose, and nature of the new Debian Social Contract as mandated by this Resolution. This notification must state that the new Debian Social Contract supercedes the older version. Subject to the decisions made in section B, this notification must also include information about the disposition of historic and current stable non-free software. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQE9zwTEgxaZAmAh+EsRAsiRAJ9by08iaY1g76xxob8JjUu7RP9USQCeJHPy j5TwMjY+gt2nZYapfw3KCuM= =DenQ -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
