On Tue, Jul 06, 2004 at 06:31:34PM -0400, David Nusinow wrote:
> This smacks of arrogance. Most -legal participants aren't lawyers, and as
> such have no formal training in actual legal matters. Believe it or not,
> such training does count for something. The point should be to cooperate
> with these people and have actual discussions, not beat them about the
> head and shoulders with ideology that they probably don't understand.
> This is the sort of thing that Matthew is reporting about, and it's also
> the reason for the recent backlash against -legal from within Debian
> itself.
On Tue, Jul 06, 2004 at 09:41:27PM -0400, Buddha Buck wrote:
> On Tue, 6 Jul 2004 18:31:34 -0400, David Nusinow
> <david_nusinow@verizon.net> wrote:
[...]
> You said that better than I would have, if I had fallen to my
> temptation to reply to Thaddeus. I agree 100%, and with perhaps more
> emotion.
>
> I do have a question.... on an individual package-by-package basis,
> who does have final say as to whether or not it follows the DFSG? The
> developer who packages it? The Release Manager? Upstream?
On Wed, Jul 07, 2004 at 07:44:38PM +1000, Andrew Pollock wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 06, 2004 at 06:31:34PM -0400, David Nusinow wrote:
[...]
> Well put. I couldn't agree more.
Well, while you're all vigorously agreeing with each other, it would be
nice if you guys would cite actual examples of debian-legal people "beating
upstreams about the head and shoulders with ideology".
As a subscriber to -legal for years now, my experience is quite different.
On many occasions, upstream licensors have thanked us for working with them
to come up with a better license. There are even *recent* examples[1][2]
of this.
The most frequent and bitter acrimony on (and about) -legal seems to come
not from upstream developers, but from Debian package maintainers who can't
articulate why a license is DFSG-free beyond "because I said so!". In many
cases, this comes not from the maintainer of a package whose license is
being studied, but from some third party Debian developer who seems enraged
that questions are even being asked.[3]
[1] "Special thanks to all those people from Debian Legal who worked
constructively with us on this onerous task [...]"
http://www.latex-project.org/ltnews/ltnews15.pdf
[2] "Thank you for your help, Remco."
Message-Id: <[🔎] 20040704220714.5df7f12c.raseesink@hotpop.com>
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/07/msg00040.html
[3] http://blog.bofh.it/id_42
http://blog.bofh.it/id_40
http://blog.bofh.it/id_38
http://blog.bofh.it/id_37
--
G. Branden Robinson | The National Security Agency is
Debian GNU/Linux | working on the Fourth Amendment
branden@debian.org | thing.
http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | -- Phil Lago, Deputy XD, CIA
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