Re: DFSG violations in Lenny: new proposal

[Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org>]

Hi,

        This email is an excerpt from Sven Luther, sent via
 private email. Ths is unedited, but incomplete, I have not included the
 final paragraph of that email, since I could not defend posting that,
 and this is what I am comfortable sending. The eliding the final
 paragraph does not, in my opinion, detract from the content of the
 message. 

        manoj

On Tue, Nov 11 2008, Sven Luther wrote:

> Hi Manoj,
>
> In order to avoid the mess that was the the etch vote, could you please
> clarify what exactly is meant by :
>
>    and the firmware  is distributed upstream under a license that
>    complies with the DFSG. 
>
> because this is subject to controversy, and i think we should avoid
> confusion at this point.
>
> Some may argue that it is enough for a binary-only firmware to be put
> under a source-less BSD-like license, and this is the kind of license
> that you mean here, but what is the fundamental difference between a
> blob which is issued of a BDS-like license where the license holder
> chose to do a binary-only release, and a firmware blob which has a
> distribution license not mentioning sources at all, like is the common
> case.
>
> Sure, you could say that the BSD is a free license, but there is
> absolutely no difference either practical or ideological, between these
> two cases, since in both cases the firmware blob is considered non-free
> by the DFSG.
>
> As such, it seems to me that the above sentences contradicts itself, and
> nullifies the rest of the proposal, which was already my critic
> concerning the etch vote.
>
> Could you thus clarify your thoughts, and give some example as to what
> you consider a firmware blob which could be distributed in main under
> your proposal, and another which could not.

> Please forward this mail to the mailing list, since i am being
> censored. 

> Sven Luther

-- 
Capital Punishment: The income tax. --anonymous
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>  
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