Raul Miller wrote:
> > The mistake is acting to preclude some free distribution, support and
> > use of software.
On Tue, Jan 20, 2004 at 11:45:08AM +0100, Sergey Spiridonov wrote:
> How do they preclude free distribution? By distributing non-free? Or by
> not distributing free instead of non-free?
The mistake I'm talking about is not one we've made, but one we're
contemplating making. I'm talking about forbidding the distribution,
within debian, of software which satisfies some but not all of our
guidelines.
> > I think you're talking about fairness, not ethics. You seem more
> > concerned with the universality of our decisions than the result of
> > those decisions.
>
> I am concerned with the result of Debian decisions as well as with how
> they will be realized.
Your argument seems to me to be something like:
If we distribute package A,
but package A doesn't satisfy all of our guidelines,
it's possible that there is some problem which package
A ought to be useful for,
but that we can't solve using package A.
THEREFORE
we should make sure that we can't solve any problems at
all using package A.
The problem I see with this line of reasoning is that your perceived
problem "we can't solve some problem which package A ought to be useful
for" becomes a much larger problem with your proposed solution.
--
Raul
As an aside: In my opinion, the value of the DFSG is:
[*] packages which satisfy all of the guidelines are packages we can
support.
[*] Packages which satisfy some of the guidelines are packages that we
might be able to support in a limited fashion,
but [if that is the case] which may require special action
on the part of the package maintainer.
[*] Packages which satisfy none of the guidelines are packages which we
are not allowed to support.
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