diziet | Please vote in favour of the Debian Social Contract change (Reply)

tl;dr: Please vote in favour of the Debian Social Contract change, by ranking all of its options above None of the Above. Rank the SC change options above corresponding options that do not change the Social Contract.

Vote to change the SC even if you think the change is not necessary for Debian to prominently/officially provide an installer with-nonfree-firmware.

Why vote for SC change even if I think it’s not needed?

I’m addressing myself primarily to the reader who agrees with me that Debian ought to be officially providing with-firmware images. I think it is very likely that the winning option will be one of the ones which asks for an official and prominent with-firmware installer.

However, many who oppose this change believe that it would be a breach of Debian’s Social Contract. This is a very reasonable and arguable point of view. Indeed, I’m inclined to share it.

If the winning option is to provide a with-firmware installer (perhaps, only a with-firmware installer) those people will feel aggrieved. They will, quite reasonably, claim that the result of the vote is illegitimate - being contrary to Debian’s principles as set out in the Social Contract, which require a 3:1 majority to change.

There is even the possibility that the Secretary may declare the GR result void, as contrary to the Constitution! (Sadly, I am not making this up.) This would cast Debian into (yet another) acrimonious constitutional and governance crisis.

The simplest answer is to amend the Social Contract to explicitly permit what is being proposed. Holger’s option F and Russ’s option E do precisely that.

Amending the SC is not an admission that it was legally necessary to do so. It is practical politics: it ensures that we have clear authority and legitimacy.

Aren’t we softening Debian’s principles?

I think prominently distributing an installer that can work out of the box on the vast majority of modern computers would help Debian advance our users’ freedom.

I see user freedom as a matter of practical capability, not theoretical purity. Anyone living in the modern world must make compromises. It is Debian’s job to help our users (and downstreams) minimise those compromises and retain as much control as possible over the computers in their life. Insisting that a user buys different hardware, or forcing them to a different distro, does not serve that goal.

I don’t really expect to convince anyone with such a short argument, but I do want to make the point that providing an installer that users can use to obtain a lot of practical freedom is also, for many of us, a matter of principle.