Re: OSD && DFSG - different purposes
Sorry, I'm still catching up. I found myself short an Internet
connection at this year's Mardi Gras so I'm wading through a few hundred
emails.
I'm not prepared to respond to this at length in this message but I will
summarize some thoughts. I'm in the process of preparing a full document
discussing these ideas.
The underlying reason I see an advantage to the community encouraging a
unified definition of Free Software is government legislation. It is
fairly obvious to me that neither patents nor Free Software are going to
go away anytime soon. As a result we are going to see various
compromises made about what is and what isn't fair play as legislators
work through these problems. If legislators are left with a confusing
picture of what the community wants then we can be assured that those
compromises will not make us happy.
Therefore, it is in the best interests of the community to overcome the
obstacles blocking a unified process. Whether the various players can do
that is a different matter entirely.
The other path open to us, and this is something I am addressing in my
document, is to aggressively grow Debian's user and developer base to
the point that other definitions become irrelevent. This path, while
difficult, is largely a logistical problem and perhaps more
approachable.
E
On Tue, 2003-03-04 at 15:40, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote:
> Russell Nelson <nelson@crynwr.com> writes:
>
> > Ean, could you explain to Thomas why you think we should have one
> > definition of Free Software?
>
> Excellent! I think there should be only one definition too. But I
> don't think the OSD should get any votes in the process. Sorry, but
> you all have not demonstrated your comptence to me in this regard. I
> think the FSF has an admirable definition; I think that Debian has a
> workable enough one for its limited purposes. I think the OSD has
> proven itself not sufficiently trustworthy to be in charge of the
> task.
--
_____________________________________________________________________
Ean Schuessler ean@brainfood.com
Chief Technology Officer 214-720-0700 x 315
Brainfood, Inc. http://www.brainfood.com
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