Re: debian-legal review of licenses

[Henning Makholm <henning@makholm.net>]

Scripsit Simon Law <sfllaw@debian.org>

> 	Of course, perhaps the best thing for -legal to do is have
> people self-nominate themselves to this position, and then have a small
> vote.

Hmm.. do we really need to have a single person charged with writing
all of the summaries? As far as I can see, that would just be
bureaucracy for its own sake.

What we possibly need is

 1. A (documented) way for license authors to request a summary after
    a conclusion has been reached, or after the discussion has run
    for, say, a week without reaching any conclusion.

 2. A way for someone to volunteer on a case-by-case basis to do the
    summary. Hopefully without needing too much separate
    infrastructure for selecting one of several volunteers.

For example, I would be happy to summarize a discussion once in a
while (even often), but I wouldn't be comfortable with taking the
formal responsibility of sifting each and every flamewar in the group
for possible nuggets, irrespective of how much stress real life puts
on me at any given time.

If there are just 4-5 regulars who feel like me, the chances of
someone volunteering for any given request would be much better than
the chances of a Single Official Summarizer not being buried under
real-life tasks for the week in question.

Here's a proposal for a light-weight process:

 A. The license author mails his license to d-l and includes the magic
    words: "Please do not cc your internal discussion to me, but I'd
    aprreciate being told about the final verdict". Or words to that
    effect.

 B. Discussion starts, as usual.

 C. Anyone can volunteer to write the final summary by saying so in an
    email to the list. In the interest of keeping the signal-to-noise
    level of the list up, volunteerings should be piggybacked on mails
    contributing to the analysis of the license whenever possible.
    A couple of days into the discussion it becomes appropriate to
    send messages for the sole purposes of volunteering.

 D. When you volunteer to summarize, select a random 6-digit integer
    as a "priority" and write it in your email. If several people
    volunteer without seeing each other volunteering, the one with the
    highest number wins the responsibility. (This will break the tie
    without wasting more messages on the matter).

 E. When a week has passed from point (A), the winning volunteer
    rereads the entire discussion, writes his summary and mails it to
    the author with Cc to d-l.

I don't see any need for presenting the summary for approval to d-l
before sending it to the author. It's not that hard to discover either
that there's consensus for free or non-free, or that there is no
consensus. If somebody abuses the system and starts writing inaccurate
summaries, it'll be easy to reach a consensus that he should not
volunteer. We can't stop him from sending his own opinion unsolicited
to the author (and even claim it's a d-l consensus) anyway.

Someone should maintain a set of stock disclaimers to put into replies
saying either that "there's no guarantee that someone will not find a
non-free later" or "if you want a dialogue about how to make your
license free, you're welcome to contact the list again". Anyone who
cares to remember the URL of these stock paragraphs is probably
qualified to do the summary anyway.

(As for chosing random priorities: One gets to choose one's own
probability distribution - for example, according to how busy one
feels at the moment - as long as it's not so degenerate that
collisions become likely).

-- 
Henning Makholm                   "We will discuss your youth another time."