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Zacchiroli: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessmentZacchiroli: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessmentPosted Jul 5, 2012 6:56 UTC (Thu) by ayers (subscriber, #53541)In reply to: Zacchiroli: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessment by nijhof Parent article: Zacchiroli: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessment
I believe the easiest approach to handling the GFDL issue, would be having the GNU project consider packaging the documentation in separate tarballs and Debian simply leaving those packages in 'non-free'.
If the only packages in 'non-free' would be GFDL licensed documentation (and possibly the IETF documents or similar 'non-functional' works), I could imagine advertising the 'non-free' archive would be a non-issue for the FSF.
The issue, which any combined effort should focus on, is providing free replacements of sufficient quality in 'main' for proprietary software packages in 'non-free'. And in the context of the kernel (i.e. the LWN audience) that would include finding a way to viably replace proprietary firmware, which seems to be a task, which for very obvious reasons seems infeasible... but then again, lots of seemingly infeasible feats have already been accomplished in the Free Software and Open Source movements.
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Zacchiroli: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessment Posted Jul 5, 2012 8:38 UTC (Thu) by viiru (subscriber, #53129) [Link]
> I believe the easiest approach to handling the GFDL issue, would be
> having the GNU project consider packaging the documentation in separate > tarballs and Debian simply leaving those packages in 'non-free'.
I'm not sure if you are aware of this, but this is what is currently done (except that the splitting is done by Debian, not by GNU). Emacs, gcc and such already have separate packages in non-free for the non-free documentation.
> If the only packages in 'non-free' would be GFDL licensed documentation
I'm not sure how many actually used software packages non-free contains these days, at least I currently use it only for firmware and GNU documentation. I additionally use contrib for some games (Doom variants, mainly).
I don't think most of contrib is considered a problem by the FSF due to the way they consider programs and data separate concerns (this excludes the "installer for a non-free program" type packages in contrib, such as the Adobe flash plugin etc).
Zacchiroli: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessment Posted Jul 5, 2012 9:24 UTC (Thu) by ayers (subscriber, #53541) [Link]
> I'm not sure if you are aware of this, but this is what is currently
> done (except that the splitting is done by Debian, not by GNU). Emacs, > gcc and such already have separate packages in non-free for the non-free > documentation.
Yes, I'm aware of that, but the discussion was about collaboration and that was simply a suggestion that the split could be done by GNU so that Debian could use pristine tarballs. This might be simple way for the GNU project to contribute in the collaboration efforts.
> I'm not sure how many actually used software packages non-free contains
What I haven't been able to find is a clear definition of what is allowed in non-free and if there is a process for things to enter non-free. Of course if the Debian project does define a formal process and criteria of when project qualifies and when it should be retired, then it becomes a bit meaningless to argue that non-free should not be considered part of Debian. So defining such a process is probably contentious. The only thing I have found so far is:
> (this excludes
Once gnash/lightspark/whatever implement the 'to be defined/expected' functionality, I would wish for a process to have that installer removed from the debian archives as obsolete.
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