[Fsf-Debian] non-free tracking

Stefano Zacchiroli zack at debian.org
Sat Jul 7 18:03:24 UTC 2012


On Sat, Jul 07, 2012 at 11:02:54AM -0600, Paul Wise wrote:
> http://nonfree.alioth.debian.org/
> http://wiki.debian.org/NonFreeTrackingSystem
> 
> In addition, recent policy changes added the requirement for the
> debian/copyright file to document why something  is non-free.

Thanks Paul! I was myself unaware of this old initiative. I think it'd
indeed be very good to document in a central place why Debian has
excluded specific software from main. In my view of user choices, that
should be use in a way like "choice is yours, but this software is bad
for your freedoms for this reason".

It would also help in documenting the respective non-free-ness reasons
for Debian and FSF, and complement the libreplanet wiki page that way.

Pity the initiative seems to be stalled since quite a while. I wonder if
anyone on this list would be interested in reviving it.

The proper way to do so seems to be something like the following:

- turn subpages of wiki.d.o/NonFreeTrackingSystem into bug reports
  against the relevant packages

  - in doing so, we should make sure we can obtain an overview of the
    involved bug reports. A way to do so, which I'm hereby proposing, is
    to usertag them as follows:

    user: fsf-collab-discuss at lists.alioth.debian.org
    usertag: non-free-tracking

  - point from the bug report to the appropriate policy section, i.e.
    http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-docs.html#s-copyrightfile

- review non-free.alioth.debian.org (there or elsewhere) to extract and
  collect in a single place the debian/copyright entries for non-free
  packages

At least the first part is maybe something we could do together. I can't
volunteer time to do it myself, but I'll be happy to work on a bug
report template if someone would like to pick this up.  (Please don't
start filing bugs yet, as so called "Mass Bug Filing" is something that
require some care in Debian.)

Cheers.
-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli     zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} . o .
Maître de conférences   ......   http://upsilon.cc/zack   ......   . . o
Debian Project Leader    .......   @zack on identi.ca   .......    o o o
« the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »
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