On Wed, Dec 12, 2001 at 06:27:53PM +0100, Henning Makholm wrote: > I think your Final Draft does a really good job of defining a class > of Cases That Are Unarguably In The Clear. I think it does more than that. Review Bruce Perens's last mail to this list. He essentially tossed a stone tablet at our heads and said "Of *COURSE* the GNU FDL is categorically DFSG-free and so is everything that could possibly licensed under it. Now shut up, you gibbering morons." At least, this is how I interpret his attitude given that he never followed up to my reply (nor, to my knowledge, to anyone else's), nor elected to participate any further in the discussion. No, I don't think it's obvious to everyone that the GNU FDL can be applied in a DFSG-unfree manner. > My uneasiness is with what we to with cases outside of this class. > Your proposal does not say anything about what happens there, and > seems thereby to imply that "they should be automatically rejected". It implies that accepting them would not be consistent with past practice. Message-ID: <[🔎] 20011212160457.GG6500@deadbeast.net> "In any event, my proposal does not forbid the grandfathering of any particular package in main. It also doesn't forbid making exceptions in the future. It's an interpretive guideline. That means it's an analysis of how we (Debian) actually apply the DFSG consistently in practice. I could be wrong, but I think clarifying the exceptions to DFSG 3 as I have is not going to be unobjectionable to most people. (In other words, who's going to be shocked that we think it's okay for copyright notices and license texts to not be modifiable?) [...] Note that my proposal does say that any such packages shall be removed from main. I don't maintain any affected packages, and I'm not an archive administrator, nor do I have any other authority to cause packages to be removed from main. How consistent Debian wants to be with its stated principles in the future is not something I have sole power to determine." > True. Let me try to clarify my position. I don't like the way the > Emacs manual is licensed, no matter whether we call it DFSG-free or > not. But I don't think that my dislike for it [1] should make it be > automatically rejected from Debian (which, after all is neither my > personal toy nor just a random list of various DFSG-free things, but > is supposed to be an actually useful OS). Just exercising my right > not look at things in black-and-white. You have that right. But I must ask you some questions: 1) Are there any grounds upon which a person could reasonably consider the license on the GNU Emacs Manual as non-DFSG-free? 2) Is personal dislike for the license on the GNU Emacs Manual the only reason someone might consider it non-DFSG-free? 3) Do you feel the Free Software Foundation deserves selective exemption from the DFSG? 4) Is it possible for a work to be neither, or both, DFSG-free and DFSG-unfree at the same time and in the same respect? If so, how? In my opinion, as an organization, Debian has to make occasional black-and-white decisions. That doesn't mean that every developer feels a deep philosophical affinity for such decisions. -- G. Branden Robinson | Debian GNU/Linux | If existence exists, branden@debian.org | why create a creator? http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
Attachment:
pgp4iq60YEJ0b.pgp
Description: PGP signature