On Mon, Apr 26, 2004 at 09:59:53AM -0400, Raul Miller wrote: > On Mon, Apr 26, 2004 at 02:56:09PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote: > > So, if the technical committee would like to comment on this issue, > > take the decision out of my hands, or overrule any decision I might > > otherwise make, now would be a good time. > > The technical committee can't override the constitution (nor foundation > documents) any more than you can. > > However it might be worthwhile introducing a "Sarge Exception", making > an explicit grandfather clause applicable only to sarge, and earlier > distributions, so we can release the it. This is philosophically ugly, > but then some people (perhaps RMS) think the same of debian as a whole. > > The language of that GR might run something like: In the past, we > have had some disagreements between ourselves about what it is we're > trying to do and what should go in a free distribution. We intend to > fix those issues, going forwards, however to release the version of > the distribution which we were about to release, it's going to have to > include some components which might have been acceptable under our old > social contract but which are definitely not acceptable under the new. > We resolve to distribute the "Sarge Distribution" with packages licensed > as they are currently licensed, even though these license conflict > with the updated social contract. We'll also be providing in "Sarge" > a document listing at least one such conflict for each of these packages.
Well, I'd second this, if it was put forth. > As an aside... or as a possibly related issue, consider glibc -- here > is a piece of software which is licensed as free (though RMS might say > that the LGPL licensed components aren't as free as he'd like), but > which in practice is still distributed in almost-binary form (you can't > build current versions of glibc on linux without having extremely current > binaries because the version skew is so great). In essence, the preferred > form for working with this software must include its binaries... anyways, > I've not thought this all the way through, but parts of glibc are GPL'd > software and there's some possibility that without the sarge exception > we wouldn't be able to distribute glibc (or maybe any of the GPL licensed > parts of the tool chain) in its current form. Huh??? This procedure is called bootstrapping... I don't believe this is related to the issue in any way and just dilutes your (valid, IMHO) point above. Michael -- Michael Banck Debian Developer [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.advogato.org/person/mbanck/diary.html
