Re: Debian should not link to n*zis nor ship their software (Re: Debian Certified Laptops -- Possibility of collaborating with Framework?

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Dominik George <[email protected]> writes:

> Hi,
>
>>tech-ctte rules on *technical* issues, so this doesn't really seem
>>within their  mandate. And the community team has no powers on the
>>contents of packages.
>
> It occurred to me, on several occasions, that noone in Debian (short
> of its members via a GR) is responsible for overseeing the Social
> Contract. Maybe with all the topics of these days (AI and its
> consequences, facsism,=E2=80=A6), it's time for some sort of ethical coun=
cil,
> and for updating the Social Contract?

I think this issue is somewhat similar to the advertisement concern with
gnome-control-center:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=3D1136336

In both packages, there is no real clear guidance from Debian Policies
what is deemed to be acceptable contents within a package.

It seems both these issues could be helped by better guidance on matters
of acceptable package content.

Personally, I would find it really problematic if we would have a hard
policy to filter packages depending on political, religious,
philosophical etc views of the upstream author.

That's a slippery slope to motivate excluding just about anything,
depending on your own political/religious/philosophical/etc preferences.

That said, I also have sympathy with the goal to shepherd an inclusive
and friendly atmosphere and Operating System that promotes the spirit of
the DSC/DFSG.

Having a package that display a really provocative message to the user
inside Debian seems problematic and warrant discussion and possibly some
action.

Maybe we don't need to bike-shed the engineering approach to social
concerns by defining a rigid policy document.  Social issues cannot
always be resolved by technical procedures.

Thus, I propose to write down some guiding principle on this, with
examples of clearly offensive content that maintainers should be
patching out.  It doesn't have to be a hard policy, but a guiding
principle around a complex social topic.

Such a document would encourage good social behaviour, and maybe we
could have a committe that guide maintainers on these matters is useful
as a escalation point different to the tech-ctte.

FWIW, Petter did patch out the offensive messages here, which seems
somewhat reasonable.  Dropping the Homepage URL may be warranted in this
situation too, but it could also be an over-reaction that is
counter-productive for end-users.  Repacking the upstream source code
without the offensive message could be done, but also has negative
consequences for auditing costs and maintainance.

/Simon

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