On Wed, May 14, 2003 at 08:20:57PM -0400, Joey Hess wrote: > > Well, I'm willing to go along with this, but it means adding yet another > > exception to our "no invariant text" rule, in addition to the five I > > already enumerated. > > I'm having a hard time with the idea of calling a peice of text that > we're allowed to keep up to date "invariant". Maybe "unremovable" or > something. Okay. I'm more concerned with the concept than the terminology for the purposes of this discussion. > We can probably come up with requirements for unremovable text that > would be so onerous as to be effectively non-free, but the line is in > a different place than the line for invariant texts. Sure. > > I'd rather see this clause clarified until it can do some good, or > > stricken entirely so it doesn't serve as bad precedent for more > > invariant text requirements. > > Unfortunatly given what Colin said about the LDP being tired of hearing > about copyright issues from him, they don't seem very likely to listen > or clarify the license. > > And I would hardly rate this amoung the worst written licenses in > Debian. Licenses seem to either be written by a non-lawyer, and thus be > vague, self contradicting, and prone to misinterpretaton, and thus suck; > or be written by a lawyer, and thus be impossible to understand if > you're not one, possibly contain poison pills, and skirt the very edges > of the DFSG, and thus suck. :-P I don't disagree with your remarks, but as I said, I felt it was only fair to subject other licenses to same degree of scrutiny as we do the GNU FDL. Just as we should not accept a license from the FSF that we'd reject from anyone else, we shouldn't reserve heightened scrutiny for FSF licenses -- even if the FSF should know better than to publish licenses that abrogate people's freedoms. I think my critiques of the default LDP license are pretty minor and should be addressable without acrimony. If that's not the case then we collectively problem have a problem with this upstream. Are we really sure this is the case? -- G. Branden Robinson | "Why do we have to hide from the Debian GNU/Linux | police, Daddy?" branden@debian.org | "Because we use vi, son. They use http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | emacs."
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