On Wed, Feb 27, 2002 at 10:34:41PM -0800, Walter Landry wrote: > tb@becket.net (Thomas Bushnell, BSG) wrote: > > Walter Landry <wlandry@ucsd.edu> writes: > > > And to answer a question posed by Steve Langsek, yes, people can lie. > > > People have always been able to break licenses. Just because it is > > > difficult to police doesn't make it irrelevant. Debian still has to > > > make it a condition that people don't make nukes with the software. > > No, we don't have to make it a condition. We simply have to be > > careful not to actually make such a distribution knowingly. > You're confusing what we have to make as a condition versus what we > have to do to enforce that condition. The enforcement is quite lax, > but the condition is still there. The essence of your argument seems to be that, rather than doing the best we can to promote and spread Free Software under the circumstances, we have a moral imperative via the DFSG to stick our collective head in the sand whenever our philosophy comes into conflict with the edicts of governments. I don't buy that. The net result of this change, even if all US mirror operators choose to post a notice wrt T7 and making bombs, is a significant INCREASE in the overall availability (yes, even to people the US government doesn't like) of high-quality free software. This is 100% in line with our mandate, regardless of the strictures under which some regional branches of our organization might be forced to operate. It is pedantic and counter-productive to say we're placing use restrictions on the software by doing this; and even if it were TRUE, it's still not what the DFSG says. The DFSG refers specifically to licenses, and we are not placing any license restrictions on people who download software from our mirrors. The US government has created this restriction, and it has been the consensus in the past that local law does not render a license non-free unless the licensor includes those restrictions in the license itself. We are not doing this. Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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