On Mon, Dec 03, 2001 at 10:13:20PM -0800, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote: > Branden Robinson <branden@debian.org> writes: > > > In addition to these outright offers to amend my proposal, I've > > considered several alternatives at length in many of mails on this > > subject. I trust you don't the Message-ID's and quotes for those as > > well, but all you have to do is tell me I haven't and I'll oblige you. > > Because I rejected some alternatives, like "why not just not bother with > > any of this at all", or "why not just give the package maintainer > > complete discretion" doesn't mean I didn't consider them. > > As yet, you haven't really said why you oppose a proportional system, Actually, I did. Message-ID: <[🔎] 20011202051311.GC25368@deadbeast.net> > A proportional limit seems more sensible to me. It doesn't to me. I don't find a megabyte of invariant text acceptable, whether the total work is 1, 2, 3, 4, 10, or even 20 megabytes. Beyond that we're getting into highly unusual territory for Debian packages in general. In other words, a one-megabyte slab of unmodifiable text appears to me be of sufficient magnitude to fly in the face of DFSG 3, even if it's only 5% (or even 1%) of the package. This, of course, is a judgement call on my part, and your judgement may differ. One way to explore this issue might be to try and determine the largest amount of unmodifiable text that existed in a package in main when the DFSG was approved (if the package hasn't since been removed for violating the DFSG, and does not today -- in other words, oversights don't count). However, there might be practical difficulties, and I'm not such a strict constructionist that I don't think we can't interpret the DFSG in a manner that makes sense for today's issues. Over time, things change. For instance, the 4-clause BSD license was once more acceptable than it is now. Nowadays, GPL compatibility is (arguably) more important than ever before, and the University of California's abandonment of the "advertising clause" is an important bellwether. > especially since it's easier to deliberately evade a fixed limit > system. How so? Can you provide some examples? -- G. Branden Robinson | There's nothing an agnostic can't Debian GNU/Linux | do if he doesn't know whether he branden@debian.org | believes in it or not. http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | -- Graham Chapman
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