On Mon, Dec 03, 2001 at 01:54:42PM -0800, Walter Landry wrote: > I'm actually of the opinion that Debian shouldn't allow any invariant > text except licenses and copyright notices. I wouldn't object to amending my proposal along these lines. In this case I would eliminate clause 3) entirely and amend 2) to include the entire text of the license as opposed to just the legally binding part(s). Note that such a standard would relegate the GNU Emacs Manual and _Using and Porting GCC_ to non-free. That would upset some people. To that end, I'm willing to bend a bit to accomodate the GNU folks on a utilitarian basis. However, such accomodation naturally requires artifices. One would be to say the FSF can do whatever it wants and we'll call it Free. Another is to set a limit on the amount of non-modifiable text and permit packages into main with less than that amount. This limit could be non-relative (my proposal), proportional (Thomas Bushnell), or vary per package and depend on the package maintainer's discretion (Anthony Towns, I think). All of these are, however, artifices. None is inherently legitimized by the DFSG. Everyone is looking at Debian's existing fuzzy, incoherent, largely undocumented precedent and history, and justifying their own proposal based on their interpretation of that vague record (possibly mixing in other agendas, like "give me the GNU Emacs Manual as-is or give me death" or "you can trust a maintainer's discretion, but only up to a point, beyond which you should try to achieve group consensus"). If the choice is between adopting your stance and being doomed forever about how many angels can dance on the head of this pin, I'd rather just adopt your stance and have done with it. It might motivate people to actually pay attention to the election-methods people, which would permit us to fix our buggy Standard Resolution Proceudure, which would enable us to vote on the whole "Foundational Documents" mess, which would enable to us to know if we can amend the DFSG or not. > Debian is not in the business of distributing political commentary > and/or fiction. No, but as long as such material is licensed freely, I don't particularly have a problem with it, personally. The "data" section was approved for creation for just this reason, though the archive admins, AFAIK, never actually created it. -- G. Branden Robinson | I've made up my mind. Don't try to Debian GNU/Linux | confuse me with the facts. branden@debian.org | -- Indiana Senator Earl Landgrebe http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
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