Public SourceMage Discussion List

["Jeremy Blosser (emrys)" <jblosser-smgl AT firinn.org>]

On Nov 04, Seth Alan Woolley [seth AT positivism.org] wrote:
> The list isn't as important as the benefits of actually being free.  
> Being surrounded by vendors who want to create lock-in at work, I don't 
> want to participate in it in a non-paid environment.  I can't even come 
> close to assuring quality, not so much in a "I'm sure of this", but if 
> something comes up, I can't fix it myself.  I don't have any money for 
> it, so I can't _pay_ a vendor to fix their product to work with 
> sourcemage (which is the normal way to fix a problem in a piece of 
> proprietary software you don't actually have access to).  We're 
> officially supporting non-free packages according to the social 
> contract, so I don't have deniability if a problem in non-free software 
> crops up from a QA perspective.
> 
> If we're not supporting non-free packages, I want it explicit.  If we 
> are, I want it explicit as to how much.  Right now, we support it so 
> long as it's not a dependency of the core (which has been argued that it 
> has been through perforce).  If I can build a support matrix for 
> packages that doesn't include any non-free packages, I'd feel better, 
> ...

You might do better in getting people to agree with you if you would make a
more formal, less ambiguous proposal.  You started out with "let's do these
things so we can get added to their list", when what it really sounds like
the bottom line is, you don't want the QA team to be expected to support
software that isn't Free.  Those are not remotely the same thing, and you'd
probably get a lot more support for the latter than the former.

If we wanted to address this, things we would need to answer include, at a
minimum:

1.  What does Free mean in this context?  Yes, we use the FSF definitions
for what we'll include in the main grimoires, but the question of what we
will just distribute and "support" arguably warrants looser definitions.
The FSF's license comparison doc is not the most objective and consistent
thing, and if all we want to say WRT QA is "we won't support software we
don't have the source for", we could still include other licenses.  The UW
license, for example, doesn't prevent us from viewing pine's source and
patching it, but it's not considered Free by the FSF.

2.  What does "support" mean anyway, especially from the QA perspective
you're making the argument from?  We don't really provide upstream support
in any official capacity for any packages, GPL or otherwise.  We create
packages that install on systems in as close to an upstream default
configuration as possible.  Sure, we get asked user questions like "how do
I get xorg/procmail/nvidia's binary drivers working", but once the spells
are installed I think anyone answering those is doing it on their own time
and not because the distro is obligated to the user in that regard.

> (The following is a separate and higher level argument from the one 
> above.)
> 
> ...but I also don't want GNUdists to be able to say I'm supporting 
> non-free software by association with a group.  The easy way around this 
> is to not associate the non-free to our group.

The easier way is to determine we're going to do what makes the most sense
for us and our users and not care about what some other group thinks.

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