On Fri, Jul 04, 2003 at 02:03:11PM +0200, Florian Weimer wrote: > Andrew Suffield <asuffield@debian.org> writes: > > >> Debian really needs a separate policy for works which are not > >> software. > > > > We could have a policy for non-software, but it should still exclude > > non-free things. What you are trying to say is "Debian really needs to > > include non-free things". > > There are borderline cases, such as the GFDL or free works in > non-editable formats (PS, PDF, in some cases even HTML), or licenses > or other documents of perceived legal relevance. I have argued on debian-legal that licenses as applied to specific works that are part of the Debian OS (meaning, "in main") are permitted to be non-modifiable, for the same reason that the copyright notices themselves are permitted to be non-modifiable. In many countries, including the U.S., it is a criminal offence to obliterate or modify an copyright notice such that a work's copyright becomes fraudulent. However, a document like the GNU GPL which claims copyright and has non-free license terms could not be distributed in main of itself. (Yes, I know that we ship it in a way you might think is "of itself" in base-files. You'd be right if we didn't have other packages' copyright files refer to /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL, but we do.) It doesn't seem too much of a stretch (to me) to say that the same prohibition applied to the binding terms of a license text is not problematic, for it obviously benefits us and our users to have correct and true license terms on the software we distribute. If we cannot have a good-faith belief that the license terms stated on a work are not the ones that actually apply, then we might as well get out of the distribution business. None of this reasoning applies to the IETF's RFCs. -- G. Branden Robinson | If a man ate a pound of pasta and a Debian GNU/Linux | pound of antipasto, would they branden@debian.org | cancel out, leaving him still http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | hungry? -- Scott Adams
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