Bits from the DPL: Freedom and etch

Posted by Scott_Ruecker on Aug 29, 2006 10:09 AM EDT
; By Anthony Towns
Mail this story
Print this story

As a project, Debian is heavily committed to the ideals of free software. That's not news to anyone reading this, I'm sure, as it's something we've constantly worked to improve, whether that be by establishing our Social Contract and the Debian Free Software Guidelines or by working with other organisations such as Software in the Public Interest, the Free Software Foundation, the Open Source Institute, or Creative Commons to further promote those ideals.



--gBBFr7Ir9EOA20Yy Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Hello, world!

As a project, Debian is heavily committed to the ideals of free software. That's not news to anyone reading this, I'm sure, as it's something we've constantly worked to improve, whether that be by establishing our Social Contract and the Debian Free Software Guidelines or by working with other organisations such as Software in the Public Interest [0], the Free Software Foundation [1], the Open Source Institute [2], or Creative Commons [3] to further promote those ideals.

Another two major steps we have made towards the ideal of software freedom over the course of the project has been removing the need to run non-free software to contribute to Debian -- made possible by Werner Koch's development of the GNU Privacy Guard (gnupg/gpg); and removing the need to run non-free software on our own servers, which was completed in May 2000 when we switched from qmail to postfix and exim for handling debian.org email [4].

The most recent efforts in relation to this ongoing goal have been in paying increased attention to the freedoms provided for works other than regular applications and libraries -- most notably documentation [5].

I believe the current expectation is that there will be absolutely no problems ensuring that the Debian System will not only be composed entirely of free applications and libraries, as it has for years, but also of free documentation, free graphics, free videos, free fonts, and free drivers.

At this point, there seem to be only three areas where we won't easily be able to meet the goal of everything in the Debian System meeting the DFSG:

(a) License texts only rarely explicitly allow other authors to create new, derivative licenses based on existing ones -- you either use what's there, or get your own lawyer to draft something in their own words.

(b) We generally aren't able to consider distributing truly large "source" files, including losslessly encoded video, geographical data sets, or the complete design specification for some fonts.

(c) A number of drivers in the Linux kernel include firmware to be uploaded to the chipsets they support that is provided as either a sequence of hex codes, or as a separate binary file -- while modifying the code is allowed, in many if not most or all such cases, the firmware is effectively being provided without useful source.

License texts themselves are not an easy issue to resolve, but this is somewhat balanced out by that generally not being necessary -- and indeed while we do encourage people to come up with modifications to software they use, coming up with new and modified licenses is often a much worse idea than reusing an existing free license, even if it has flaws.

Large source files and how we should deal with them have been an unresolved concern for a long time -- Bug#38902 might give you some idea just how long. Up until now we've dealt with it by simply packaging the source in the form that we need it -- for which a reduced or compressed form almost always suffices. It will probably be some time yet before we can come up with a sensible technical approach here that balances out the bandwidth and storage usage appropriately.

Firmware, however, is a much more immediately resolvable issue -- and one that has already progressed signficantly over the past few years as Linux's interface for loadable firmware has improved, and hardware manufacturers gradually become more comfortable with releasing free drivers and free firmware.=20

The major problem remaining for Debian in handling that, is that we don't have a good way of supporting installs on hardware that needs firmware that we don't have source for and have separated into the non-free component. Joey Hess summarised the problems in dealing with that to the -vote list [6] and estimated six months of work developing the appropriate support in the installer, with presumably more time needed after that for testing and quality assurance.

So the question is what should we do here? One approach would be to say "we're committed to making the Debian System completely free, so until that's done, we're not ready to release". Another is to say "we've made a lot of improvements since sarge, on this score and others, so let's get etch out now, and move onto the next bit after that". A third is to say "we've committed to getting etch out, and to making it be completely free -- if that means not supporting a range of hardware, so be it".

One way or another we're going to have to make a decision on what approach to take fairly soon -- and general resolutions on how to square up the approach we take are already being discussed on the debian-vote list. Personally, I'd appreciate knowing which of the above goals Debian users and developers actually think are the most important before deciding I'm going to approach them; and to that end Jeroen van Wolffelaar has kindly setup a couple of polls you might like to vote in.

Two polls for users are hosted on forums.debian.net [7] to all registered users, asking:

What is the most important for the release of Etch? Release on time (early december) =09 Do not ship sourceless firmware in main =09 Support hardware that requires sourceless firmware =09

and =20 Since it appears Debian has to make a choice, which would you prefer we= do? Allow sourceless firmware in main =09 Drop support for hardware which requires sourceless firmware =09 Delay the release of etch=20 (so that we can support loading firmware from non-free) =09

Unfortunately you can't indicate your preferences, so you have to choose one of them. You can leave comments, on the other hand; though I'm afraid it's unlikely we'll be making "CowboyNeal" the most important priority for etch no matter how many times it may be suggested as a write-in candidate.

Additionally Jeroen has setup a developer only poll [8] that does allow preferences and is authenticated via GPG signatures in the same way regular Debian votes are. Unlike regular votes, however, the current results of the vote will be available before voting has closed.

Note that both these polls are just an informal way of finding out what people think, and while they will be considered and taken into account, they won't necessarily be the final word on the matter.

Thanks for your time!

Cheers, aj

--=20 Anthony Towns Debian Project Leader

[0] As well as supporting Debian, SPI also supports activities of OFTC, the PostgreSQL community, the Open Voting Foundation, and most recently freedesktop.org. A number of groups that SPI has supported in the past have since grown enough to justify their own organisation, including the LSB (the Free Standards Group), Gnome (the Gnome Foundation) and OpenSource.org (OSI).

[1] Debian was originally an FSF project itself, and as well as sharing a long association with the GNU Hurd project, we also work closely with the FSF on software projects such as glibc and gcc, and in the review and development of licenses such as the GNU Free Documentation License and the drafting process for version 3 of the GNU General Public License.

[2] Debian has been closely involved in OSI since its founding -- with Eric Raymond joining Debian in the same week as both the DPLs of 2005 and 2006 in order to work with Bruce Perens on creating the "open source" term, using the Debian Free Software Guidelines as a basis for the Open Source Definition. Debian particularly supports both OSI's ongoing work in introducing companies to the benefits and ideals of free software, and the work of the OSI License Proliferation Committee in encouraging reuse and compatability in software licensing.

[3] Evan Prodromou recently reported on the progress made in working with Creative Commons on having their new licenses work match the Debian Free Software Guidelines -- you can see more about that at:

http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2006/08/msg00051.html

[4] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2000/05/msg00003.html

[5] Such as working with the FSF on revising the GFDL to match Debian's ideals of freedom, encouraging free software authors to use the same license for their documentation as their software to ensure it's free, and working with groups such as the Creative Commons to extend free software principles into the domain of free works in general.

[6] http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2006/08/msg00122.html

[7] http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?p31126 http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?p31128

[8] http://master.debian.org/~jeroen/polls/firmware/ballot.txt

--gBBFr7Ir9EOA20Yy Content-Type: application/pgp-signature; name="signature.asc" Content-Description: Digital signature Content-Disposition: inline

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----

iD8DBQFE8zeAOxe8dCpOPqoRAhG9AJ0f83qn3tcNcAKLaY3prKsRebvMVwCfQh+V IdBWEpUZtoJjnqG9+DtUgfA= =qb6I -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

--gBBFr7Ir9EOA20Yy--

-- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [e-mail:debian-devel-announce-REQUEST@lists.debian.org] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [e-mail:listmaster@lists.debian.org]

  Nav
» Read more about: Groups: Kernel, Debian, GNU, PHP, GNOME, Community, Linux; Story Type: News Story

« Return to the newswire homepage

This topic does not have any threads posted yet!

You cannot post until you login.