There is a growing problem of documentation being locked into walled gardens. Most particularly, Cloudflare and to a lesser extent hosts like gitlab·com where several demographics of people are discriminated against. The discrimination manifests either as an outright blockade or as a CAPTCHA which often requires non-blind users to execute non-free JavaScript, while at the same time blind people are simply excluded.
Sometimes artifacts that are officially part of Debian (such as man pages) reference URLs to web-served documentation that exists in access-restricted walled gardens, or non-existent documentation because URLs are not permanent.
As web enshitification continues to trend out of control, there is a lack of digital rights standards and quality standards in place to steer the Debian project away from digital exclusion and technofeudalism. This is all I can find on debian.org—
From the Debian Social Contract¹:
¶1 “We will never make the system require the use of a non-free component.”
Ideally this would carry some weight when users are forced to execute non-free JavaScript as a barrier to documentation. But digital rights opponents would likely cling to the keyword “require”, as doc access is not technically a requirement.
¶4 “Our priorities are our users and free software
We will be guided by the needs of our users and the free software community. We will place their interests first in our priorities. We will support the needs of our users for operation in many different kinds of computing environments. … In furtherance of these goals, we will provide an integrated system of high-quality materials with no legal restrictions that would prevent such uses of the system.”
Love the last sentence in particular. I would like to interpret integrated /high-quality materials/ to mean that a quality system inherently integrates documentation into it (although I don’t suppose documentation was intended in that “integration” meaning). Consideration should perhaps be given to make a change along these lines:
s/no legal restrictions/no legal OR TECHNICAL restrictions/
It’s also ½ tempting to suggest “s/materials/documented materials/”, though perhaps that would invoke an expectation that docs be created when they don’t exist (thus controversial). But would it be sensible and feasible to add some verbiage to include a goal that existing docs be universally accessible?
From The Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG)²:
“5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups
The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.”
This anti-discrimination policy only covers licensing. When a walled garden is used to discriminate against classes of people, the discriminatory act is not expressed in any license. So the guideline falls short of covering real world discrimination scenarios. Note that the “GNU Ethical Repository Criteria”³ expresses some sensible principles that the Debian Project should consider adopting, such as “Does not discriminate against classes of users, or against any country. (C2)” and “Permits access via Tor”, for example.
From The Debian Policy Manual⁴:
“12.4. Preferred documentation formats
The unification of Debian documentation is being carried out via HTML.”
This section strongly encourages HTML. Perhaps rightly so, but HTML encourages hyperlinks which unacceptably often either link into a walled garden or the link just dies. Without any further guidance beyond saying /we like HTML/, bad links and restrictive links will proliferate.
Section 12.3 does not stress in the slightest the importance or benefit to pulling additional docs into a $package-doc pkg. If most of the essential docs are jailed in readthedocs·io or bobs_restricted_access_doc_jail.com, it’s important that those docs be imported into a $package-doc pkg. Docs that are freely accessible to all people don’t call for a duty to act, but ideally all significant docs should be in a $package-doc pkg anyway particularly for offline users and those on capped networks.
There was a related past discussion here:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2019/09/msg00010.html
though that was primarily about people being subjected to non-free services (which is only a small facet to the walled garden problem).
PROPOSAL
