As far as I can tell, both Steve's and Gunnar's proposal would make Debian less of a free software operating system than it is today. That makes me sad. My preference for an outcome would be along the following lines.
================== We continue to stand by the spirit of the Debian Social Contract §1 which says: Debian will remain 100% free We provide the guidelines that we use to determine if a work is "free" in the document entitled "The Debian Free Software Guidelines". We promise that the Debian system and all its components will be free according to these guidelines. We will support people who create or use both free and non-free works on Debian. We will never make the system require the use of a non-free component. Therefor we will not include any non-free software in Debian, nor in the main archive or installer/live/cloud or other official images, and will not enable anything from non-free or contrib by default. We also continue to stand by the spirit of the Debian Social Contract §5 which says: Works that do not meet our free software standards We acknowledge that some of our users require the use of works that do not conform to the Debian Free Software Guidelines. We have created "contrib" and "non-free" areas in our archive for these works. The packages in these areas are not part of the Debian system, although they have been configured for use with Debian. We encourage CD manufacturers to read the licenses of the packages in these areas and determine if they can distribute the packages on their CDs. Thus, although non-free works are not a part of Debian, we support their use and provide infrastructure for non-free packages (such as our bug tracking system and mailing lists). Thereby re-inforcing the interpretation that any installer or image with non-free software on it is not part of the Debian system, but that we support their use and welcome others to distribute such work. ================== /Simon
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