* Bernhard Schmidt [2024-03-18 08:58]: > > For this, while I share your concerns about the unmindful use of Cloudflare > reverse proxy for basically everything I don't agree to call this a "walled > garden".
Cloudflare is a walled garden: https://thefreeworld.noblogs.org/post/2024/03/18/cloudflare-has-created-the-largest-most-rigidly-exclusive-walled-garden-in-the-world/ It’s also the most severely disempowering walled garden, worse than Facebook and Google: https://thefreeworld.noblogs.org/post/2024/03/20/comparison-of-the-human-disempowerment-severity-of-3-walled-gardens-facebook-google-and-cloudflare/ > Certainly not enough to call the mentioning of an URL that just > _now_ happens to be "protected" by Cloudflare a policy violation (or > social contract violation) and alter the URLs to web.archive.org, > which to my experience is broken quite often, dog-slow and not > necessarily up-to-date. I think this would be more of a disservice. The Social Contract (DSC) and the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) are concerned with equality (“No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups”) and quality (DSC ¶4). One might say that wholly denying access to some people in order to give other people in more privileged groups access that loads faster and is more up to date is better quality, but it could also be argued that forcing some people into oppressive venues and denying others is bad quality overall. To be clear, I should make the caveat that the DSC and DFSG are essentially meaningless. There’s no enforcement procedure and they aren’t really written well to fully convey the author’s intent. They are just spiritual guidance at best. But I brought it up because they do convey the philosphy of not excluding people arbitrarily. > Most of the interesting content should be in the manpage and in > /usr/share/doc/packages/openvpn anyway. > > If you have concerns about the use of Cloudflare, please raise this > upstream. I know there are some devs sensitive to these concerns listening. The Debian policy manual¹ encourages bulky documentation to be packaged in a separate $package-doc package. That’s not a task for upstream devs. That’s really the best quality because it gives some degree of immunity to bad links and walled gardens (depending on how well it’s done). It is optional, of course, but IMO it’s the best solution when the external docs are in an exclusive walled garden particularly when the man pages refer users into that walled garden. ① https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-docs.html#additional-documentation
