On the other hand, many of the regulars seem unhappy with the makeup of the Debian Free Sofware Guidelines. One thing that's often overlooked about the DFSG is that they aren't purely a list of freedoms that Debian considers necessary. The document also contains a set of explicit compromises - points which we can look at and say "Yes, it would be nice if that weren't the case, but that level of freedom is good enough anyway". Clause 4 is an explicit compromise based on the fact that patch clauses make life awkward but don't really prevent you from doing anything (anyone who claims that they do isn't being imaginative enough when it comes to build systems). Clause 1 has a fudge for the Artistic license.
Now, oddly, while it would obviously be socially unacceptable to say things like "I think DFSG 3 should be removed", the same doesn't apply to DFSG 4. I find this interesting. I agreed to the DFSG because I believe they strike the right balance between freedom and pragmatism. And, fundamentally, as an operating system Debian depends on both of these things equally. Until the point where there is a clear consensus that the DFSG's line is drawn in the wrong place, we should reject efforts to compromise these practicalities to the same extent as we would reject efforts to compromise the freedoms that we consider so important.
There are already signs that this is a problem. It's been suggested that copyleft licenses (such as the GPL) are only free because they're explicitly mentioned in DFSG 10. While I see the DFSG as defining a fairly straight line, others see that line as being somewhere further out to the side with clauses 4 and 10 being bulges that stick out to grab certain items that were considered strategically useful at one point.
Part of the problem is that it's not clear where the majority of developers do see the DFSG's free/non-free line as being. I'm inclined to think most would be closer to my viewpoint, but I have no way of telling. When Debian was smaller, it was more practical to establish this - the original Social Contract discussion only generated a couple of hundred or so emails. Nowadays people don't want to talk about it, which is fairly unsurprising given that any mention of the DFSG nowadays is fairly doomed to spark a few hundred mails with approximately no information content. I'm not sure how to solve this. Bruce's attitude would probably have been to just write a policy statement and get people to agree to it - is that sort of thing still possible? Is Debian too big for us to get a majority of people to say "The line is here, even if I don't necessarily think it should be"?