On Sat, Oct 15, 2016 at 03:40:10PM +0100, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
On 10/15/16, mdn bernardlprf@openmailbox.org wrote:
Debian's approach of this isn't really ethical.
they're doing the best that they believe they can do, but they _have_ been told. see joey hess's very public description of the Debian Charter as a "toxic document".
i've spoken to the FSF about this: from what i gather, the changes required are actually very very simple: all they have to do is add in a simple popup message whenever someone clicks the "nonfree" section, issuing a warning to the end-user that the consequences of their actions are leading them into unethical territory.
Debian and the FSF have agreed to differ on this: Debian folk have problems with GFDL with invariant sections, for example. Ask John Sullivan what the FSF posiiton is.
Non-free is NOT a part of Debian, nor is contrib - but they are provided as a covenience for users. It's also worth knowing that security updates for non-free are almost impossible.
BUT ... If you've got a Broadcom chipset, for example, you may have no option but to use proprietary software. Most Intel wifi chips also require firmware - what are you going to do when that's emebedded in a new laptop / nettop ?
They repostiories do have to be explicitly enabled: the question of whether you want to install non-free software is asked explicitly in the installer - so the notifications are there.
Ironically, if wifi adapters / Ethernet cards still came with burnt-in firmware, Debian would be a fully free distribution (and it's worth remembering that Debian was endorsed and funded by the FSF for a while).
If you want any architecture other than Intel / AMD as a primary supported architecture then your choice is prety much Debian from the mainstream distributions and Trisquel / GNewsense are forks which don't yet support all other architectures. So, if you want to do work to enable your project on a Cubietruck - you use Debian, probably.
Andy C
NOT SPEAKING FOR DEBIAN PROJECT AS A WHOLE :)
... how simple would that be to add?
the other parts (creating separate DNS names and different repositories for the nonfree sections) could be done transparently with HTTP rewrites and redirects (just like devuan seems to be doing) as an interim measure, then removed at some appropriate point after a couple of major releases.
it's really, really not very hard, and we'd end up with Debian - one of the world's leading Software Libre OSes - being RYF Compliant.
as it is, we have to fuck around forking tens of THOUSANDs of packages, with efforts to do so failing under the sheer weight of the task and the required resources.
i really really wish the debian group would wake up, just a little bit.
*sigh*.
l.
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