On Sun, Dec 05, 2004 at 03:55:27PM +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote: > Andrew Suffield <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > [...] freedom of expression constitutes one of the essential > > foundations of a democratic society and one of the basic conditions > > for its progress and each individual's self-fulfilment. > > > > [...] it is applicable not only to "information" or "ideas" that are > > favourably received or regarded as inoffensive or as a matter of > > indifference, but also to those that offend, shock or disturb. Such > > are the demands of pluralism, tolerance and broadmindedness, without > > which there is no "democratic society". > > > > Debian is not a democratic society.
You carefully deleted the part where I said that was a lousy name for it. The original authors have a 'democracy' fetish; they meant 'free'. > It is not intended to be a source of > all information known to man. It is supposed to be a project to produce > a Free operating system. That means: > > a) Things that are not useful should not be in there For a very weak definition of 'should', and a very broad definition of 'useful', sure. > b) Things that are gratuitously insulting to a large number of people > should not be there unless they're fantastically useful That's entirely arbitrary. You can't just make this stuff up. In no sense does this follow from the stuff quoted above. You've also introduced the undefined quantifiers 'gratuitously', 'insulting', 'large', and 'fantastically', so that can mean anything you want. > Having this argument over a program that is entirely useless in the > first place just makes it harder to have a proper discussion in the > cases where it actually matters. On the contrary, it makes it easier (you are aware that this is not the first time this subject has occurred?). > Or, putting it another way: failing to include this piece of code does > Debian no demonstrable harm. However, deliberately refusing to include it because of some people whining does Debian quite significant, demonstrable harm. It indicates that merely by whining loud enough you can eject arbitrary code from Debian. > Including it does. Can't see any. If you're trying to raise the old "Debian must attract more users" thing then we've been over it so many times already: Debian in no sense gains or loses from changes in its userbase of less than an order of magnitude. And it's only the accuracy of bug reporting that improves anyway. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- |
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature
