We (at GBdirect) use Debian for most of our servers, so I was a bit worried when I saw mention on Debian weekly news of Anthony Towns insisting that the supposedly ‘editorial changes’ that were recently made to the Debian Social Contract now make it impossible for Sarge to be released in its current state.
Apparently the problem is that the Debian developers have been discovering all sorts of non-free things that have crept in (documentation under the GNU FDL, and various bits of firmware for kernel drivers). This could be a problem for Sarge, the long-awaited next stable release, according to Towns:
At the rate we're currently going, I don't really expect to be able to achieve this this year. In light of the new Social Contract, however, I don't believe there are any other decisions I can make in this area.
I really think the Debian developers need to get their act together here. If there are lots non-free things in Debian now, then they've been there for years. Lets just get Sarge released, so that people like me can use a recent enough version of Perl, Vim, or whatever your favourite critical package is. Refactoring all the kernel drivers and the installer, and rewriting all the documentation, is not the sort of job that you want to take on just before a release. Make it the first thing on the todo list for the release after Sarge, but now is not the time to be worrying about it.