Re: Licenses for DebConf6
On Sun, 13 Nov 2005 13:43:07 +0100, Henning Makholm <henning@makholm.net> said:
> Scripsit Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org>
>> This is a conference for Debian development. By definition, Debian
>> is 100%free. Am I mistaken in assuming that people contributing to
>> Debian are already familiar with the social contract, and have
>> decided to conform to it?
> You are mistaken in thinking that the social contract mandates
> anything about the freesom of things that we do not put into our
> operating system.
Mandates, no. But why do you think we even have a social
contract? Why do we insist on having new members ratify it? There are
not just silly rules and historical formalities; there is an
underlying belief that says that when information is free, the
resulting collaborations, synergy, and novel uses of bits and pieces
in a new whole can make the new effort far more rewarding, and allow
it to go further, than if the information or software was not free.
All these applies to talks as well; talks can be reused,
modified, have bits included in other talks, to make the new talk
better, and to spread the ideas further, and create new ideas, far
better than if the original had been under a stifling non0free
license,
>> Are you now advocating we throw open contribution to Debian to all
>> kinds of licenses for software content, and not run away from the
>> non-free software by refusing to do so?
> Why do you persist in refusing to to ignore people making a
> distinction between things we put into our operating system and
> things that we don't?
Because I am looking deeper than just the surfaec; in a
shallow look, I guess there is nothing in the words of the social
contract that applies to what Debian does otherwise,. However, the
principles of freedom of information still apply in both cases.
I do think it is about time that we practiced the freedom of
information being useful more than as just a mere slogan and have our
conferences be a mirror of our distribution: useable bits of
information and presentation that pepe can modify for their own use,
combine in other presentations, and feed back additions and
orrections, making our conference papers a living document, and a
shared resource.
manoj
--
Man must shape his tools lest they shape him. Arthur R. Miller
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/%7Esrivasta/>
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