Re: Social Contract GR's Affect on sarge
On Fri, Apr 30, 2004 at 02:10:35AM -0400, Nathanael Nerode wrote:
> Perhaps because it's been *debunked*? "remaining 100% free software"
> includes "remaining software". That's how English works.
>
> If I say that a racist, sexist club will "remain 100% white men", it does
> not mean that the men will remain white and that black women will be
> allowed in. It just plain doesn't.
>
> Perhaps that analogy will convince some of the people who still doubt?
Please Nathanael, enough. This thread is long enough without you
replying 20 times saying basically the same thing. Once or twice is
fine... no need to mailbomb the thread...
Your use of the word "hypocrisy" doesn't seem appropriate to me.
Hypocrisy means telling others to make particular choices, but not
making those choices yourself when in the same situation. Anythony is
not telling other people to take out GFDL documentation for sarge while
keeping it himself; that would indeed be hypocrisy. You can say you
think his interpretation of the social contract is wrong or is
inconsistent, but I see no hypocrisy.
As for the social contract.. if I write some crappy poetry and there
exists a Debian package of it, I don't see how that is software. I
would think the intention of the "100% free software" clause is that all
_intellectual property_ in Debian will be DFSG-free, not that everything
packaged in Debian is 'software' by definition. The intention is that
Debian can be freely distributed and modified, and of course it's an
"operating system" so we intend that there are runnable programs.
In theory Debian would be fine if it was just a kernel, libc, shell and
a million PNGs. Not as useful of course, but still perfectly following
the social contract even if the PNGs make up 99% of Debian.
--
Vincent Ho
loki /at/ internode.on.net
Every complex problem is a simple hierarchy of simple problems.
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