Re: Social Contract GR's Affect on sarge
On Tue, Apr 27, 2004 at 08:28:01PM -0400, Michael Poole wrote:
> The recent GR was specifically about removing the "software" versus
> "not software" ambiguity so that no one could argue that exceptions
> for documentation or other bits are consistent with the SC. Why do
> you assume that this exception for license text is any more acceptable
> or permissible than is shipping firmware?
I didn't assume anything. I tried to make it clear that the point of
this message was *not* to argue strongly for or against non-free license
texts in main, but rather only to suggest that non-free license texts
are not the same thing as unmodifiable license terms.
Unmodifiable license terms is a subject that's been discussed to death
on debian-legal, and I suspect this is what Manoj is thinking about. I
agree with him at least on that: we obviously can't require that all
software allow us to change the terms under which they're distributed;
that doesn't even make sense.
However, probably as a somewhere obscure side-effect of this, unmodifiable
license *texts* have always been allows in Debian, and I think arguments
that license *texts* should be subject to the same requirements as all
other software is reasonable. (I'm inclined to disagree with it, but not
to dismiss it as "idiocy".)
--
Glenn Maynard
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