Defining Free Software Business

MJ Ray mjr at phonecoop.coop
Tue Jun 27 13:47:08 UTC 2006


Kaloian Doganov <kaloian at doganov.org>
> 	In a wider sense: the Debian Project does not hold copyright of
> 	any proprietary software, unlike Microsoft, Sun, Oracle and Adobe.
> 
> Indeed, one can act unethically (in Debian Project's case --
> distributing proprietary software to users) without a clear and obvious
> motive.  I really do not understand Debian Project's motivation to
> organize unethical activities, but unfortunately, they do not convert to
> ethical ones just by this reason.

  '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.'
  -- http://www.fr.debian.org/social_contract

Maybe neither of us agrees with the resulting action, but I
think that's an understandable, clear and obvious motive.
The Debian OS itself is 100% free software nevertheless and
the project doesn't develop proprietary software.  I'd expect
the debian project to be in GBN's contrib list, not GBN itself.
-- 
MJR/slef
Laux nur mia opinio: vidu http://people.debian.org/~mjr/
Bv sekvu http://www.uk.debian.org/MailingLists/#codeofconduct




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