Defining Free Software Business

[MJ Ray]

Yavor Doganov <yavor at doganov.org>
> someone is one of the major GNU distributions, a free software
> project, offers proprietary software to its users hiding behind the
> "Our priority are our users" slogan, well, that is not only totally
> unacceptable, it is disgusting.

debian does not hide this, unlike some other distributions.
That is another promise: "We will not hide problems."
It would be unacceptable to hide it, but it isn't hidden,
so save the disgust for those who merit it.

> Imagine how this looks like to us, a poor flock of Debian users -- an
> advice (not really, a "statement") from the Debian Project, a project
> that *distributes* non-free software, that GFDL is conditionally free

2006/vote_001 was a position statement, not advice to others.
The debian project sometimes advises others, but this wasn't
one of those times.  I know the press release was rather
misleading on that, but that's a known bug with debian press IMO.

> (actually, that's the statement as per the GR, the debian-legal folks'
> consensus is that it is non-free under all circumstances).

Not sure whether it's consensus and trying to determine that
is rather irrelevant following the position statement.  I
still can't see why the source and DRM parts are acceptable,
but I can't change that decision for the whole project.

> [...] at debian-devel-announce there is an announcement of the
> *absolutely the same non-free as it was* Java and some developers are
> happy about the inclusion in the archive!

Some other developers are very unhappy, but the best advice was
that certain developers have put themselves at risk, not the
project, so it's not something many want to work against directly.
Why waste time working on non-free software?

> This is absolute hypocrisy,
> while one cannot observe anything similar in the FSF's actions.

One cannot observe most of FSF's actions.  Its funds
could be mainly used buying Lotus Notes for distributing
Microsoft Word macro games, for all most of us know.
(FSFE seemed better, though, with accounts online at
http://www.fsfeurope.org/about/funds/funds.en.html although a
little out-of-date now?)

> [...]  However, many "technical" guys have joined the
> Debian Project and their votes count.  Obviously it is far more
> important for them to be a "successful" distribution than to stand firm
> behind the ideals and principles of Free Software.

It should be possible to do both, but you don't reverse any
such trend by attacking the "stand firm" developers.  Enough
already seem to be leaving the project, for various reasons,
without extra abuse.

> [...] I always
> wondered why we don't strongly object against your licencing policy
> while the BSD community had always fiercly opposed the GPL.

"your licencing policy"?  Alex Hudson was not a debian developer
last I knew, although I'd more than welcome it.

Hope that explains,
-- 
MJR/slef
Laux nur mia opinio: vidu http://people.debian.org/~mjr/
Bv sekvu http://www.uk.debian.org/MailingLists/#codeofconduct