Hi all, I've been thinking about the FDL issues lately, and have been reading up on some of the flames that have been going on about it. One thing that's really striked me is this: as Debian Developers, we've all been formally asked whether we agree with the social contract and with the DFSG; and those that have been in the project long enough, have crafted them. As such, this document is the sole thing in the Debian project that keeps us together; if not for the Social Contract and the DFSG, we wouldn't be on the same side of things. Therefore, if this document would ever not be up-to-date with current situations, and would need re-interpretation or rephrasing, we all would need to agree on (a revised version of) it again. Not doing this could result in a major split of the Debian project. Going back to the matter at hand, whether the FDL is free or not, it's most of all important to decide whether the DFSG can apply to a license such as the FDL. It's important to note that the FSF has created this license since it felt there to be a difference between 'software' at the one hand, and 'documentation' at the other. Additionally, the FSF is not alone by claiming software isn't the same thing as documentation; international agreements and most countries worldwide make a distincion between how software and other copyrighted stuff is protected by law. We cannot just go ahead and ignore all that, saying that "we don't have a definition for anything other than free software, so we'll take that definition and apply it to whatever people throw in our general direction." OTOH it's not because other people find software and documentation to be two different things, that the Debian project blindly has to agree on that. However, I feel this is something debian-legal can *not* decide on its own; Debian developers agreed on the Debian Free *Software* guidelines, not the Debian Freeness guidelines or something similar. Therefore, I think it's imperative that we do consult the Debian Developers as a whole (possibly through a general resolution), so that we can take a stance here. If we go the general resolution way, I propose the following: * First and foremost, we should ask our co-developers whether or not we agree that Software and Documentation should fall under the same set of rules to be considered free; thus, whether the DFSG can be applied to "documentation". * If the answer to that first question is that documentation cannot be considered the same thing as software, we should define what we understand to be 'software', and what we think is 'documentation'. We should also define what documentation licenses can be considered free, and what documentation licenses cannot. Ideas, comments, thoughts? -- Wouter Verhelst Debian GNU/Linux -- http://www.debian.org Nederlandstalige Linux-documentatie -- http://nl.linux.org "An expert can usually spot the difference between a fake charge and a full one, but there are plenty of dead experts." -- National Geographic Channel, in a documentary about large African beasts.
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