Re: Re: Social Contract: Practical Implications
I wrote:
Article 10 of the DFSG reads as follows:
The "*GPL <http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html>*", "*BSD
<http://www.debian.org/misc/bsd.license>*", and "*Artistic
<http://www.perl.com/pub/a/language/misc/Artistic.html>*" licenses are
examples of licenses that we consider "/free/".
Glenn Maynard writes:
This is clearly referring to the *terms* of the GPL, not the *text* of the
GPL.
Wrong. I am quoting DFSG text, you are not. "The GPL [and other] licenses
are examples of licenses that we consider 'free'". Period. End of sentence.
The DFSG says that the GPL is a free license. Period. It does not
distinguish between "terms" and "text". You may argue, if you like, that
the DFSG is internally inconsistent, if you believe that elsewhere it forbids
licenses from forbidding their own modification. But then you have a problem,
as I know of no licenses recognized by Debian, or OSI, or the FSF as free
that don't require the user to include certain text unaltered.
If you disagree, then you and I have different interpretations of DFSG#10.
Since your goal is merely to be condescending, and to try to blow off
threads that you're not interested in, I'm not going to debate this with
you.
My purpose, as an admirer of Debian, is to try to keep the project from running
itself into a rathole. If you pursue your line of argument you will force
Debian to cease its existence, as there are no licenses that meet your
standards of freeness. It's not condescending to attempt to stop a friend
from driving into a tree. If you insist that every byte be changeable, only
public domain licensing will do, and then you have a problem that it takes
a legal document to reliably put something into the public domain, and we
can't let people go changing that legal document.
(With that, we can ignore the spouting off of Joe Buck.)
Personal insults are unnecessary, and there are too many of them on debian-devel.
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