Re: Red Eclipse should be in main
On 06/03/14 13:52, Markus Koschany wrote:
> You don't concede that artwork is not software. In my opinion they
> are not the same and there is a reason why licenses like CC-BY-SA
> exist and not just the GPL. You completely ignore the fact that art
> is useful in many ways and that "source code" is something
> intrinsic to software.
This has been an extremely contentious point in the past, and the
project's current position, after a couple of GRs, appears to be that
Debian does not distinguish between executable code and artwork when
applying the DFSG. I'm carefully avoiding saying "software" when I
mean "code" in this mail, because one of the most contentious things
in previous discussions has been whether the term "software" should be
taken to include non-code or not.
If you intend to try to convince the project as a whole that this is
counterproductive, go for it; but please read up on what has happened
in the past first, so you aren't either rehashing previous discussion,
or presenting an effective policy change as being existing practice.
I do personally think there's value in being less strict about "the
preferred form for modification" as opposed to "a form you can modify"
for non-code, because the preferred form for modification is far less
clear-cut than it is for code. I also think there's a risk of making
it extremely difficult to package games (and other "code + assets"
bundles) of any significant size in main, by effectively assigning
bugs of the form "this texture/sound/... is difficult to
modify/reconstruct without replacing it entirely" an artificially
inflated severity.
Some relevant GRs (mailing list discussion around them is also likely
to be relevant):
<https://www.debian.org/vote/2004/vote_003> "Editorial amendments to
the social contract" successfully changed the SC to say "works"
instead of "software". Whether that was an "editorial amendment" or a
policy change is a controversial question: people who thought the
previous policy *already* applied to non-code considered it to be a
mere clarification, while people who thought the previous policy only
applied to code were quite upset when its implications became clear.
<https://www.debian.org/vote/2006/vote_004> "Position statement
clarifying DFSG #2" was, as I understand it, an attempt by people in
the latter group to return to (their interpretation of) the previous
policy. It was narrowly out-voted by Further Discussion.
Regards,
S
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