On Friday 14 November 2008, you wrote: > But you have to see that castrating the ideals of the project is just > as damaging as these distribution problems are. I believe Debian has > remained important over time because, despite our various social > failings, they *respect* our ideology. We remain relevant because we > assert a standard and have managed to mostly provide a useful product > while complying with those standards.
And I believe that Debian is becoming increasingly marginal because users are driven away to other distros. Sure, it is nice that a lot of those users go to derived distros instead of "real" competitors, but IMO it is still unhealthy if Debian's own user base becomes too small. After all, we largely depend on having that user base for a healthy turnover in DDs and having motivated translators and such. IMO nobody here is promoting indiscriminate "distribution of proprietary binaries" as you call it, nor to change our ideology. IMO we can still work towards a perfect world while being a bit more pragmatic and serving the needs of our users, especially the kind of professional or large scale users that really need to able to install a distro on hardware and have it working without having to jump to hoops. Reality is that _more_ hardware, and especially more _common_ hardware is becoming hard to use because of our ideals. You can also wonder if the DFSG would be written exactly the way they are if the were written from scratch in the current time frame. I doubt it. If we are selective in our concessions to pragmatism and careful in the way we implement things (which always has been one of the strengths of Debian), I personally don't see the problem. I'm well aware that what I tend to think of as the "DFSG hardliners" in the project do not like this, but why not discuss things openly (and hopefully without too much flaming) and vote on it? Let's see what the project as a whole thinks. Cheers, FJP
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