On Wed, Dec 24, 2003 at 08:43:11PM +0000, Andrew Suffield wrote: > The effort to modify the Social Contract has stalled, and had > degenerated into more dancing around this old issue. It's way past > time to decide what we're actually going to do. We can work out how > to do it later. > > I propose the following resolution: > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > The next release of Debian will not be accompanied by a non-free > section; there will be no more stable releases of the non-free > section. Uploads to the non-free section of the archive will be > disabled as soon as is feasible. The Debian project will cease active > support of the non-free section. > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > Some constraints have been applied here on when these things will > happen, but most has been left deliberately vague. The fate of the > files currently in unstable/non-free is deliberately unspecified. > > This conflicts with the Social Contract as it currently stands. I am > aware of this and I do not care; we can fix the Social Contract > later.
Why not fix it now, if fixed it should be? While I may find the proposition of some of BR's changes a bit precarious (we don't guarantee non-free, but we don't necessarily strike it yet either), I find this alternative to be more or less nonsensical. If we're going to remove non-free, we should vote to just remove it - including SC clause #5. It also makes us look rather stupid, issuing a policy statement that is in direct - and, upon proposal, admitted - conflict with a foundational document. I agree that all the dancing around the issue is silly, but dancing the other circle isn't any better. But perhaps I'm missing something; can you explain why this is better without the removal of SC #5? (Other than the possible reason of not needing a 3:1 supermajority, which would be silly, since actually DOING anything about it would still require a 3:1 SM vote to remove clause #5 at some other time, before we could act on it without violating our promises). -- Joel Baker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ,''`. Debian GNU/NetBSD(i386) porter : :' : `. `' `-
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