Re: Debian Weekly News - August 19th, 2003

[David Weinehall <david@southpole.se>]

On Sun, Aug 24, 2003 at 02:25:51PM -0400, Brian T. Sniffen wrote:
> "Marco d'Itri" <md@Linux.IT> writes:
> 
> > On Aug 22, "Brian T. Sniffen" <bts@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> >
> >  >Additionally, whether the DFSG should apply to documentation in Debian
> >  >is not relevant to the survey, which asks whether the GFDL complies
> >  >with the DFSG: we can deal with the insanity of whether this software
> >  >over here is or is not software later, but figuring out whether the
> >  >GFDL is a DFSG-free licence for software is also important.  That's
> >  >what the survey's asking about.
> > I'd say that you have your priorities wrong. If we decide that
> > documentation is not software then there is no reason to waste time to
> > figure out if the GFDL is DFSG-free or not.
> 
> Of course there is: there is source code licensed under the GFDL in
> several Debian packages.  In order to not have to do surgery on the
> GNU Emacs and GCC packages, the GFDL will have to be found DFSG-free
> anyway.
> 
> -Brian

Pardon?  I seriously hope that you're being sarcastic, because trying to
bend over backwards and deliberately trying to misinterpret the DFSG
just to get accept certain software is just hipocrisy.  Yes, gcc would
be nearly impossible to replace, but reasonably one can assume that the
parts of it that are licensed under the GFDL are small enough that they
are replacable, either by using earlier versions of those files and
doing a lot of work on our own to redo the rest, or by rewriting them
from scratch.

As for GNU Emacs, the situation is less serious, since it's
an editor, not a build-essential package.  I am pretty sure the same
thing can be done here, though.  And if its manual is licensed under the
GFDL, we'll simply have to make due without the manual, sad but true.
Or have the manual in non-free, whatever feels is most appropriate
(let's not start a discussion about removing non-free now, shall we?)


Regards: David Weinehall
-- 
 /) David Weinehall <tao@acc.umu.se> /) Northern lights wander      (\
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