[I am not subscribed to -newmaint.] On Fri, Jul 30, 2004 at 08:37:40PM +1000, Matthew Palmer wrote: > For that matter, I'm not quite sure we should necessarily be subjecting > applicants to the joys of rigorous licence analysis. We have d-legal for > this purpose just so maintainers don't have to be licence experts. The > question about Pine licencing is a pretty good test of basic DFSG analytical > ability. The trouble is, some of the same people who are excused from doing rigorous license analysis during P&P proceed to style themselves as licensing experts and spitefully ridicule the people who *do* do the hard work on debian-legal. We've seen great many examples of this over the past few months. Count me in favor of increasing the amount of licensing-oriented material in P&P. In my opinion, we want new developers to more easily grasp the facts that: 1) sometimes subtle issues are involved when trying to understand a license; 2) even licenses like the BSD and GPL represent compromises with "pure freedom" 3) phenomena like "moral rights" (droit d'auteur), software patents, and regulations on cryptography can cause a given work under a given license to be de facto licensed differently in different jurisdictions that Debian cares about We can't teach people to be respectful of the careful thought and analysis that (often) goes on in -legal, but we might be able to throw enough information at them that they are discouraged from just blindly assuming that all problems are trivially easy, and that they enjoy a perfect understanding of everything that all right-thinking people share. For some reason, some folks assert apodictic certainty about legal issues with a fervor they wouldn't dare attempt with respect to technical software issues for fear of being ridiculed and thought of as immature brats by their peers. -- G. Branden Robinson | It's extremely difficult to govern Debian GNU/Linux | when you control all three branches branden@debian.org | of government. http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | -- John Feehery
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