Re: Are DFSG free package in non-us part of Debian?
***** MS => Martin Schulze
MS> The DFSG doesn't cover law of certain countries, thus I have to
MS> admit that the DFSG doesn't play the central role here. Since the
MS> DFSG only covers redistribution through license it seems to be
MS> DFSG free.
Please, excuse my insistence. You Joey, consider `The GNU Privacy
Guard' to be DFSG free or not?
MS> However due to lame crypto law it still cannot go into main and
MS> thus no package in main may depend/recommend on/ it.
I do understand it's a difficult situation, but what I don't
understand is that you are unwilling to consider alternative
solutions. We may work toward a dependence design that warns the CD
user that some selected package depends on some other package which is
not on his CD for some reason, asking him to confirm selection (if he
happens to have another CD with that package) or not. It's a
technical limitation that we could overcome (and we'll _have_ to do it
anyway, since main won't fit on a CD forever).
>> I disagree most strongly with this interpretation, in fact I think
>> it's perfectly free.
MS> Then why is it in non-US instead of main?
So, are you really saying that DFSG free packages which happens not to
meet US export regulations, like gnupg, are not really free packages?
Consider this paragraph of the DFSG:
>--------------------------------------------------------------------<
6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the
program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not
restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being
used for genetic research.
>--------------------------------------------------------------------<
Why do you think it's there? Now, suppose that some country declared
genetic research illegal (this is not even unlikely and maybe already
true for some country c in {country of the world}). For the sake of
speculation, suppose that you happen to have genetic research software
in main. Or, suppose that some country forbids physics research,
maybe because its people think that physics research is against their
religion (I'm Italian, you know, maybe you recall of a certain man
named Galileo Galilei (which BTW lived in the same city I presently
live in, i.e. Pisa), that happened to face this very problem).
Following your line of reasoning we should simply kick that software
out of main. Excuse me to be so explicit, this sounds to me like
plain nonsense.
MS> The compiler is a bad example, since a distribution without a C
MS> compiler can't exist.
It's a Gedanken Experiment, it doesn't need to be real.
MS> If you're referring to some sort of vi or other program, yes, we
MS> would have to, otherwise we won't be able to provide free software
MS> for these countries. I assume that you won't want to keep this
MS> countries from using Debian / free software.
Please, reconsider your statement now, enlightened by what I said
above about genetic and physics research. Pretend main not to contain
software which may be illegal in some country is nonsense to me. It's
a lot more reasonable to apply to main the laws of the state
master.debian.org is in, but this is no excuse to deny non-US DFSG
free software from being referred by main.
MS> I remember that we already had such a discussion some time ago.
Me too, we talked about purity and it resulted in one of the biggest
flame war this list has ever experienced, at least since I'm
subscribed. :-)
MS> In that case we have to remove these packages from main or we
MS> won't support those countries.
Do you still think this way?
MS> This is a question if we want to spread free software and provide
MS> users with a free distribution of Linux or let them stick with
MS> Slackware etc.
I don't think this applies in any way to our present discussion. We
could postpone this issue until we have some way to cope with a truly
multi-CD distribution, some way that could also cope with missing (for
legal reason) CDs.
MS> In non-US you can link contrib and non-US together with main and
MS> you're done. What's the problem?
There are two problems, in my view, or, more precisely, at least two
faces of the same problem:
- non-US mixes free and not free packages, thus hides the real
status of them; I don't know of others, but to me it's very
important to know if a package is free or not, before installing
it on my system. I find this inconvenient;
- perfectly free packages like mailcrypt are not part of Debian,
because other perfectly free packages like gnupg are not part of
Debian; I find this unacceptable (even if I don't feel it urgent);
Is it clear what is the problem I see?
MS> create non-DE.
You know how many countries are in the world, do you? :-) Go out and
study all of their legal systems, then take out of main every single
package which fail to comply with any one of them. Let's even have
non-earth, for those packages illegal on our planet, which may be
legal on other solar system planets. (I'm joking, of course :-)
Are we lawyers? It's natural that every ftp site should be careful to
its country regulations, but what have this to do with Debian? I'd
only admit that master is important to Debian, so is the U.S. legal
system. But don't try to follow every other country, its a vane
effort.
Thanks,
--
Davide G. M. Salvetti - IW5DZC [JN53fr] - <http://salve.home.ml.org/>
Have a look at Debian GNU/Linux: <http://www.debian.org/>.
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