Re: GUADEC report
On Tue, Jul 06, 2004 at 08:43:06PM +0000, Thaddeus H. Black wrote:
> > Some companies feel that various licenses were
> > genuine efforts to be DFSG free ...
>
> Maybe some companies should genuinely stop
> trying to invent new free licenses. Still, if
>
> (a) they feel that they absolutely must have
> their own private buggy licenses, yet
>
> (b) they sneer at debian-legal, where the best
> expert advice in the world on this topic is
> freely available to them,
>
> then how much more can we can do to help them?
> If they want to play the game, they need to
> learn the rules first. I do not seem to have
> any trouble producing DFSG-compliant software,
> after all, and neither do you. Why should they?
> Because they have lawyers?
>
> Debian is a shining beacon. In the end, they
> will follow us. To a remarkable extent, whether
> they realize it or not, they already do.
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.
- David Nusinow
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