On Wed, Nov 13, 2002 at 09:53:41AM -0700, Joel Baker wrote: > As was noted the last time this came up, the prior expectations of Who is "we", white man? > It serves very little purpose to insist that we treat apples like oranges; > true, they're both fruit, and they're both easily spoiled if not taken care > of properly, but you'll get a bad taste in your mouth if you just bite into > an orange. Your analogy is only valid if you can establish that we don't need the same freedoms in documentation shipped in Debian main that we need for software shipped in Debian main. As far as I can tell, this has not been clearly demonstrated. People have made lots of proposals to reduce the amount of freedom our users have to manipulate documentation in Debian main, but I have yet to see an argument that isn't equivalent to, "well, it would be better for our users if we could ship Microsoft Word in main." Even if Microsoft Word were freely distributable (but still unmodifiable), we wouldn't allow it into main. Why should we apply a different standard to documentation? "Documentation isn't software" is not an answer. We ship all sorts of things in main that aren't software by one definition or another; many of them aren't documentation either. Do we need a separate set of guidelines for every different kind of thing that might go into Debian main? Debian Free Music Guidelines? Debian Free Image Guidelines? Debian Free Game Level Map Guidelines? Debian Free Random Number Generator Seed Guidelines? If so, we'd better call up Eray Ozkural so he can help us define a set of exhaustive and non-overlapping categories that will defined all the different sorts of stuff that we might want to put in main. We can then go about drafting a set of "freedom guidelines" for each. -- G. Branden Robinson | Debian GNU/Linux | "Bother," said Pooh, as he was branden@debian.org | assimilated by the Borg. http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
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