spacex wrote:… then Debian should honor it and use something else
What I'm trying to tell you is that when you say "Debian should" you are referring to your own personal point of view, which is commendable and I can totally relate to but is ultimately incorrect.
Jamie should just use a different license if he wants his work to be used in a particular way.
The free license allows Debian and anyone else to politely ignore his plea.
This is where you are getting lost.
Think about this way: I get you a television set for your birthday and bring it to you at your party. After you unwrap it I tell you that I would like you to only watch reruns of "Magnum PI" on it.
Is that a gift anymore?
Or is it a guilt trap?
In order to comply with my plea you either have to keep a useless object in your home or not accept my present.
You certainly don't want that.
Now, free software is not like a birthday gift per se, but in a similar way a developer gifts other users with his work and accepts that, just like you are going to watch everything you like on the tv set, users are going to do everything (within the boundaries of the license) they want with his program.
spacex wrote:Or the best solution would obviously be if Debian could become a little flexible, and accept newer versions of some apps in Stable. The "not likely to change" policy is just stupid. When a newer version is better, stable enough, and is no threat to the stability of the system, then the new version should be accepted in stable. Period.
This is an entirely different matter.
Even if changing Debian's policies would probably make this issue of outdated versions of Xscreensaver go away, the argument here is about what happened, not how things would be if they were different.
spacex wrote:But then again, it's no secret that I disagree with the Debian policy and cycle. Debian should pick up the pace, and have a new release every 12 months. That would put Debian somewhere in between where Debian is now, and Ubuntu, in terms of being current. Still more conservative than Ubuntu, but not as stale and outdated as today.
Not that I need it, because I can use testing/unstable, but you can't present something as outdated as Jessie to desktop users, and then warn them about testing/unstable. In that case, Debian should warn desktop users against Debian all together. Actually, I think that Debian should divide into two different releases. One conservative server-edition, and one more current desktop-edition.
But why?
It really baffles me when I hear this because there is really no need in the world for Debian to become something it isn't or, as you suggest, to double efforts and make a version of itself that is already available in many of the hundreds distros out there.
The way I see these attempts to change how Debian works, is like seeing someone trying to change -say- a tractor into a commuting vehicle.
Let's imagine Debian as a tractor, happily spending its days working the fields with plows and harvesters, then someone comes along, sees it and likes it because it is after all a good machine, that someone then starts using it even to go to his office downtown, but commuting is not as smooth. So he thinks that having different tires and maybe a bigger cabin with backseats for the kids would make it a much better and more practical ride, along with a few modifications to the aerodynamics and maybe different gear ratios, and the shocks and a nicer body, maybe a new paintjob.
Yeah, that's much better now, but it no longer is the tractor it was in the beginning.
You can even picture the analogy the other way around with Debian being a sedan and someone trying to use it in the fields, the point is the same: Debian is what it is and people use it exactly because it is Stable and "outdated" (aka very low maintenance) and that's its forte.
If you change it because you want it to be more apt (pun intended) for a different demographic, then by all means do, make you own distro like many have already and be done with it.
Nobody is forcing users to have Debian as their distro. If they like it but want it different then they want something else. And again, there are literally hundreds of choices out there.
Really, no need for Debian desktop edition or for any change in the policy, they already exist, they just do not have "Debian" in the name (well, some do, and most are "based on" anyway).
Bye