debian legal

[pvaneynd]

So far I've been less then impressed with the hardliners. They have redefined some words (software: information stored in machine readable form), extended the packaging manual to include firmware, use a different measure for "normal" packages and for drivers (depends for packages means "needs this in order to run", drivers will work without firmware, just not much can be done). In general they then to attach people by calling them stupid of illogical and you have to press them hard to quote chapter and section of a document for one of their statements.
But this is not the bad part. The truly bad part is that with mod-tactics they have cleared debian-legal from the opposition and as some matters are not resolved with a GR but "on advice of debian-legal" this means they almost run the whole show.
Why do I care. I don't care if the emacs documentation goes to contrib, or even non-free. I care that some legal drivers get booted out of main, so off the installation media, so for some people that have the bad luck to own "non free hardware" this means they will not be able to use debian without a significant hurdle. Not to mention they will have to compile their own kernel. We can forget Debian as a general purpose usable distribution if this continues.
But this is not the reason why I'm so upset, the true reason is that mobbing has taken the place of debate. In the past the debate would be heated and hard, but at least based on facts. But starting off with 1=2 you can prove a lot of things, and so the hardliners are now off proving 1=3, 3=4 etc. What can be done about it? We could go the political way and start adding legalese to define software, hardware, firmware, free, true, false etc. But this would be a fate worse then death for Debian as everything would then become a GR and the hard liners are not politicians, so they do not search a compromise, they believe. Even if we close the current "holes" they will find other words to pervert the meaning of.
After sarge there will be one heck of a fight and I fear the fedora and gentoo people will get an influx of experienced packagers. Maybe it is all for the better