Re: Knuth statement on renaming cm files and Licence violation.
Chris Lawrence <lawrencc@debian.org> writes:
> The Debian Project has a philosophical commitment to protecting the
> freedoms of the users of software that it calls "free". These freedoms
> are spelled out in the Debian Social Contract and Debian Free Software
> Guidelines.
> You can argue whether the freedom to rename some particular file is
> important or not, but that's largely beside the point as far as Debian
> is concerned; it is possible for reasonable people to disagree about the
> relative importance of that (or any other) freedom. However, we believe
> that irrespective of whether we intend to exercise the particular rights
> in question, possessing them (and, more importantly, ensuring our users
> possess them) is important.
I understand that you're trying to simplify the argument to try to explain
it to me, but you're simplifying so far that you're not usefully
representing the discussion.
The DFSG consider many freedoms to be unimportant. The freedom to
distribute modified software directly rather than in the form of patches
is not considered important, for example; see point four. The freedom to
incorporate software into a proprietary product is not considered
important; the freedom to always have modifiable software is considered
overriding. And so forth.
So while I understand and appreciate your point of view, we wouldn't be
having this discussion if it were as simple as all that. One cannot
simply say "we support freedom and that's all there is to it" because
that's not what the DFSG actually say. They say that Debian supports some
specific freedoms and considers other ones to be less important, and the
question is whether a given software package fits into those guidelines or
not.
The arguments that have been presented that say that requiring file
renaming is an infringment on the freedoms guaranteed by the DFSG are
certainly reasonable ones and I can find much in them to agree with, but
the DFSG really *aren't* clear on this point, and a ruling on the subject
does not just obviously fall out of what's already there.
(As an aside, once Debian reaches some sort of general conclusion on this,
it would be really nice to add that to either the DFSG or some supporting
material, since this has come up repeatedly for years and this exact
argument happens every time.)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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