On Mon, Mar 07, 2005 at 01:46:58PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote: > On Fri, Mar 04, 2005 at 01:57:55AM -0800, Steve Langasek wrote: > > In your platform this year, you mention a grounding in legal issues as one > > of the things that you have to offer the project as DPL. > > Over the past year, there has been a great deal of controversy (I dare > > say moreso than in preceding years) over the role of the debian-legal > > list in defining our concept of Free Software. > I agree with that assessment. There is either a perception that the -legal > mailing list has become a more "radical" place, or there are people > repeating this opinion after they hear it from others without bothering to > evaluate the traffic on -legal for themselves. > > How would you respond to critics that would claim your prominence in > > debian-legal marks you for an extremist, not a consensus-builder? > I'd say that's a pretty loaded question. :) > If mere "prominence" on debian-legal marks one as an extremist, then there > are many people who qualify as "extremists", including Sven Luther, who > posted, by my reckoning, 303 messages to -legal between January and > September of last year. > It's worth considering the question of whether prominence equals extremism. > To that end, I dashed off a quick Python script (attached) and fed it my > debian-legal folder, which in its present state contains all the mails I've > been sent from that list (I subscribe to it) since 1 January 2004. As I mentioned to you on IRC, I was indeed amused when I saw this list of top posters, because of how closely it correlates with my debian-legal reading habits of skimming messages from certain posters who contribute in volume far exceeding the original content of these messages. What's disappointing is how a single question about debian-legal has suddenly turned this thread into a veritable microcosm of that list, with repeats of disagreements that have been heard a hundred times before with no sign of anyone being persuaded by the arguments offered. I have personally found your posts to debian-legal to almost always be well-reasoned and moderate in tone. Unfortunately, mere reasonableness and moderation seem inadequate to quench the flames that plague the debian-legal list. > I don't think consensus-building is all that hard as long as common, > relevant goals can be agreed upon. Until and unless people can identify > such goals, however, it's my experience that "consensus-building" is code > language for "horse trading". Am I a good horse-trader? Am I, for > instance, willing to overlook the flaws in the Apple Public Source License > 2.0 so that we have the howl library in main[3]? No, I am not, and it > appears the consensus of my fellow developers is that we, as a project, > should not either. > Let me turn your question around a bit, then, and ask you: > * Do you feel the decision to move howl to non-free reflects the > consensus of Debian developers? I do, but it's a consensus with a large dissenting factor within the project; since I'd never talked to Jeff before about such things and had no idea what he as a maintainer felt about such questions, I was careful to emphasize the *lack* of consensus about the APSL 2.0 being free, rather than asserting that there was a consensus that it was non-free. Since Jeff apparently already felt the same way about this license, I really have no idea if this strategy is useful in practice. :) > * If so, how useful was the debian-legal mailing list to > determining that this consensus existed? Very useful; the summaries/discussion of the APSL on-list were invaluable to me in judging whether there was sufficient reason to question the freeness of the software. I just wish it were possible to do so without fear of an outbreak of argument-sketch-itis. Cheers, -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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