Re: Social Contract GR's Affect on sarge
On Tue, Apr 27, 2004 at 11:52:05PM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 27, 2004 at 03:43:10PM -0700, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> > The text literally requires that the _database_ (not only the _data_) be
> > open for public view.
>
> Viewing a database is normally understood to mean viewing it through its
> exposed interface. If presented with a MySQL database, I would not
> consider the fact that I don't know how to read the binary database format
> to impair me from viewing it.
Whether or not you know how to read it is not at issue, only whether it is
available to you. My point was that there is a distinction between access
to a database and access to data, and the two are not equivalent. I'm
playing devil's advocate by showing that the statement, at face value, is
different from Debian's interpretation of it. There exists an entire
segment of industry devoted to producing documents which can be interpreted
consistently in a certain context, and even then they argue about it.
"Software" in modern computing is normally interpreted to mean programs; we
are apparently not bound by such interpretations in Debian.
> > Besides which, the last time I was able to view it,
>
> You still can. There are mirrors on master (deprecated) and merkel, as
> publicized on debian-devel-announce.
I cannot log in to merkel, and I thought master was broken too (but its disk
is merely full).
--
- mdz
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