On Wed, Mar 05, 2003 at 12:21:41AM -0800, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote: > Sure. Why don't we adopt RMS's? That would be my first vote. I say this with great sadness, but there appears to be a difference in RMS's and the Debian Project's interpretation of "freedom 3". The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this. RMS does not perceive "invariant sections"[1], for instance, as a meaningful restriction on freedom 3, whereas (at least) several Debian Developers do. Still, as long as we can accept the FSF's definition of Free Software without swearing ideological fealty to its interpretations of the concept, I think it will serve us very well -- as it has, implicitly, for several years. I think the FSF's definition of Free Software is a wonderful foundation, but is not well suited to be much *more* than a foundation. If I had my druthers, I'd arrange Debian's licensing paradigm somewhat like the following -- and I'll admit up front that this is already pretty much the way I think of it :) : FSF's definition of Free Software --> Constitution Debian Free Software Guidelines --> statutory law debian-legal discussions --> case law (The above is admittedly wholly grounded on the U.S. legal system for its metaphorical value.) This is part of the reason I think it wouldn't be a disaster if we permitted the DFSG to be modified through a majority vote of the developers -- that's because it's not the REAL foundation. The real foundation lies in our answer to the question, "What is freedom?" Our Social Contract pledges us to Free Software; the Debian Free Software Guidelines are not a *definition* of Free Software, but rather a template into which we place a license; we then see if the license fails to mesh with the template in some way. So debian-legal, in our role as judges and arbitrators, attempt to interpret the DFSG and the licenses brought before us. But we do this in a context -- an *important* context, which is our understanding of what freedom means. This is another reason we should not be overly literal in our interpretations of the DFSG, and blithely brand a license as "DFSG-free" it seems to abide by letter of the DFSG in its narrowest reading, but poses a threat to our users or Free Software that we did not have the foresight to articulate in the DFSG. No, I think we should regard the DFSG as akin to "statutory law"; it's important, and violating it has consequences, but ultimately it is just a tool in service of the foundational principles. In the U.S., where statutory law conflicts with the Constitution, the law loses -- and it is judges who make this determination. For the Debian Project, I think that if the DFSG and the meaning of freedom conflict -- whether the DFSG is too permissive in a given case or not permissive enough -- our foundation of freedom must triumph, and the DFSG must be re-interpreted or modified. As the house experts on the issue, debian-legal is the forum best suited to act as arbitrator of these matters, though there are of course mechanisms for the rest of the Project to overrule us. Given that anyone can participate in debian-legal, I don't think there is as much risk of a culture clash between debian-legal and the Developers in general as there sometimes is between the U.S. appellate courts and the state and federal legislatures. What do you folks think of my paradigm? Useful or not? [1] http://www.fsf.org/copyleft/fdl.html -- G. Branden Robinson | Debian GNU/Linux | Music is the brandy of the damned. branden@debian.org | -- George Bernard Shaw http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
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