On Tue, 22 Jun 1999, Chris Lawrence wrote:
> > > (IMHO this proposal is a amendment to the Social Contract; it should
> > > be clearly marked as such. I also note that our beloved Constitution
> >
> > Which proposal? Wichert's or Jason's? Jason's is indeed a mod of the social
> > contract. Wichert's is a mere technical change.
>
> Both; the social contract specifically mentions the existence of
> the non-free and contrib directory structures.
This bit eh:
5.Programs That Don't Meet Our Free-Software Standards
We acknowledge that some of our users require the use of programs that
don't conform to the Debian Free Software Guidelines. We have created
"contrib" and "non-free" areas in our FTP archive for this software.
The software in these directories is not part of the Debian system,
although it has been configured for use with Debian. We encourage CD
manufacturers to read the licenses of software packages in these
directories and determine if they can distribute that software on
their CDs. Thus, although non-free software isn't a part of Debian, we
support its use, and we provide infrastructure (such as our
bug-tracking system and mailing lists) for non-free software packages.
Although it is compelling to want to think that this requires that
non-free and contrib be on the same machine, I don't think that its
phrasing would technicaly require that. What I would say is
that encouraging bundling of non-free on a CD really puts the spirit of
the document as supporting simultaneous distribution of contrib/non-free
(does it really make sense to encourage CD vendors to bundle them and
then refuse to put them together on our FTP site?).
That said, I think there is lots of merit to the idea that Wichert's
Proposal would add new text [though as proposed not explicitly] that
requires the seperate distribution, perhaps:
---
6. We will provide a means for our users to see only free software so
that they can browse the Debian Distribution with no extra
components. This makes it ubundantly clear what we consider to be
part of Debian proper.
---
Jason
