Re: General Resolution: Removing non-free, Draft 2

[cjw44@flatline.org.uk (Colin Watson)]

tb@MIT.EDU (Thomas Bushnell, BSG) wrote:
>The social contract is with the Free Software Community.  The GNU
>Project was always disturbed by the existence of non-free in Debian.
>Paragraph Five has the effect of undermining free software.  It is
>ludicrous to see the current Paragraph Five as a promise to keep
>undermining free software forever.  The Free Software Community is
>that group of people who prefer free software to non-free software,
>and work to make the former better and undermine the latter.

I wish folks wouldn't equate the Free Software Community with the GNU
Project. (I realize you didn't explicitly do so, but, by my reading, the
first two sentences above seem to encourage an implicit assumption.) The
GNU Project is clearly very important to the Free Software Community,
but it is far from alone; the Perl community, for example, is extremely
active, but tends to use a combination of licences that the GNU Project
discourages from use anywhere other than Perl. While I wouldn't presume
to speak for them, I think it's reasonably safe to say that some of at
least that part of the Free Software Community might hold rather less
strong views on non-free than the GNU Project.

-- 
Colin Watson                                     [cjw44@flatline.org.uk]