[Fsf-Debian] No response?

[Bryan Baldwin]

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On 08/06/2012 07:49 PM, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 06, 2012 at 03:50:23AM +0000, Clint Adams wrote:
>> Do you understand how a sane and honest person might disagree 
>> with you given the preponderance of evidence?
> 
> I agree and this is one of the criticism we need to address. But 
> saying, in reply to this, "see, we/you're lying" is not enough to 
> actually solve the issue.

You're right, it doesn't solve the issue, it supplies visibility of the
issues. A compliant has been made that the discussion can't go forward
until all parties ascribe to Mr. Finney's Orwellian newspeak. I
disagree. Its because we've fleshed out that disagreement that the
anatomy of the problem is now this clear.

> At that point, I argue that those people should be free to do what
>  they want with their time and Debian resources, no matter if the 
> non-free bits merely happen to be *colocated* with the official 
> free bits that form the Debian distribution.

I trust the maintainers of nonfree would not in fact pack their bags,
shut off the lights, and lock the doors if it were decided at the end
of the day to move contrib and nonfree off site. I'm not sure the open
use of Debian resources is the best way to go, but I don't think that
is a show stopper in and of itself.

I'm deeply ambivalent about colocation. I think it could be done in a
way that works. But right now, if you http/ftp to the storage and
drill down, its all there in gory detail.

In Mr. Adams examples, the bug reports and sundry forms are already
marked nonfree in an obvious way. I don't think plastering _more_
nonfree nomenclature on top of that is good enough either. Cutting and
pasting FSF philosophy with every article of nonfree is inelegant. Why
not take a copy of the Debian services framework (whichever services
that might mean), reupholster it, and serve it up from a separate URL
under a different name, exclusively for contrib and nonfree? That
would take some effort up front, but then who really wants to troll
through all the html or whatever and figure out how to put surgeon
general warnings on everything?

> (And please, refrain from lightly smash this down with "no, you 
> should delete non-free/contrib from your servers". That is indeed 
> the *alternative* solution, but for the sake of searching from 
> common ground, we need to be creative and explore all the various 
> possibilities.)

Colocation could be done in such a way that the free and nonfree
packages aren't part of the same structure. Which is to say I think
one should have to navigate to a different URL, whether served by the
same hardware or not, in order to browse the nonfree packages, bug
reports, et al. Behind the scenes needs to mean completely behind the
scenes, where the Debian nomenclature and anything nonfree never
appear together on screen, whether the maintainers continue working
transparently with each other or not.

Maybe that didn't land as close as you might hope to your idea of
ideal, but I trust it was neither light nor bashing.
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