Re: Proposed statement wrt GNU FDL
Hi Glenn,
On Friday 25 April 2003 05:00, Glenn Maynard wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 25, 2003 at 04:57:36AM +0200, Thomas Uwe
Gruettmueller wrote:
> > On the other hand, the DFSGly non-free docs that are about
> > to be thrown out of main are at least as freely
> > distributable as any other package in main. This is a
> > quality that many packages in non-free do not share with
> > them.
>
> There's lots of software in non-free that is freely
> distributable, but non-free for other reasons, such as
> limitations on commercial use. Non- free things should go in
> non-free, even if there's a lack of free equivalents.
I agree that they should not stay in main, but I don't think
that freely distributable documents should be mixed with stuff
which is not allowed to be distributed commercially, or which
according to its license, cannot be exported to Iraq.
If the new section proposed below is considered a subset of
'non-free', then I fully agree with the above.
> > As I don't have non-free in my
> > apt/sources.list, from my point of view, moving these docs
> > to the 'non-free' section would practically mean the same
> > thing as moving them to the trash dump. I guess this step
> > would be far too radical.
>
> Requiring you to add a line or two to sources.list isn't
> "trashing" anything.
I'm not convinced, yet. Can I configure apt-cache that it
produces red '[contrib]' and '[non-free]' warnings like
packages.debian.org?
> If this is a "radical" move, I'd say the earlier one of moving
> non-free software to non-free was an order of magnitude more
> "radical".
Is there any documentation of the history of the 'non-free'
section? Have there been similar discussions?
> > So, now I'm repeating an idea that I alredy mentioned here,
> > after selfhtml had been kicked:
> >
> > * Create a section 'distributable' that is between main and
> > non-free, for stuff that is not free WRT modification,
> > availability of the source code etc., but at least freely
> > distributable in any medium, by anybody, for any price.
>
> Distributors can already do this. I don't think Debian should
> be expending time categorizing non-free into "non-free and
> really non-free"; let people who would actually use the
> distinction (distributors) spend the time. (It'd be a fair bit
> of time, requiring further analysis of clearly non-free
> licenses.)
Right. The suggestion was primarily adressed to those people who
would like to change the DFSG. If they want to have guidelines
for lesser free software, in order to build a lesser free
variant of Debian, they are always free to create them, but
please not by replacing the original DFSG and the original
Debian!
cu,
Thomas
}:o{#
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