Re: A possible approach in "solving" the FDL problem
Wouter Verhelst wrote:
>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."
The law is able to allow thing to fall between catagorisations, and then
spend large quantities of time and effort dealing with the things that
fall into the gap. Pragmatically, Debian can't - having to spend
significant periods of time dealing with everything that falls between
"software" and "data" (since if we're catagorising documentation as
distinct from software, it would be hard to justify not separating data
out as well) would be a nightmare. And while documentation remains
something that can be linked into software, it's not clear to me that an
adequate distinction can ever be drawn between the two.
>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.
The status quo has been tht the DFSG applies to everything in main, and
it's certainly been applied to things that wouldn't always be thought of
as "software" in the traditional sense - see the removal of firmware
from the kernel source, for example.
--
Matthew Garrett | mjg59-chiark.mail.debian.legal@srcf.ucam.org
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