On Wed, Mar 05, 2003 at 05:08:08AM -0500, Simon Law wrote: > > Sure. Why don't we adopt RMS's? That would be my first vote. > I always thought that the FSF's (and RMS's) Four Freedoms were > always the basis of the DFSG. The Four Freedoms actually came well after the DFSG. According to web.archive.org, they seem to have been added to the GNU website sometime between December 1998, and April 1999. Coincidentally, that was about when we were looking into writing "DFSGv2" see [0], which was to be a far more definitive document [1]. Of course, you could say that the four freedoms always _were_ the basis of the DFSG, and we just didn't realise it at the time... Cheers, aj [0] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1998/debian-devel-199811/msg01944.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1999/debian-devel-199901/msg00159.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1999/debian-devel-199903/msg00055.html [1] As a consequence, this was pretty much the time when we decided that we wanted to go with flexible guidelines, rather than writing everything we thought about freeness down, and sticking to it precisely. An interesting snippet is: ``If we replace the whole thing, we'll have another year of little surprises. And the project has become more legalistic since then, so it will be harder to just ignore the effects that don't make sense. At least the DFSG is so vague that no-one can insist on following its literal words.'' http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1999/debian-devel-199902/msg01990.html -- Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/> I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred. ``Dear Anthony Towns: [...] Congratulations -- you are now certified as a Red Hat Certified Engineer!''
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