Re: Honesty in Debian (was Re: Amendment to GR on GFDL, and the changes to the Social Contract
On Sat, Feb 11, 2006 at 01:46:14PM -0500, Nathanael Nerode wrote:
> This belongs somewhere else. Directing followups to -project.
>
> Glenn Maynard wrote:
> > On Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 02:31:43AM -0500, Nathanael Nerode wrote:
> > > Incidentally, if I ever become a DD, I will immediately propose a GR to
> > > amend the Social Contract to explicitly allow unmodifiable license texts
> in
> > > Debian, since it technically doesn't, but everyone agrees that it
> should.
> > > I'd welcome someone else beating me to it.
> >
> > Then people will start saying things like "the GFDL is free, if the
> invariant
> > sections happen to be license texts!"
> Not if we do it my way: see below.
>
> <snip>
> > [1] As an extra-aside, see
> > http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/04/msg02344.html for an
> observation
> > about the difference between "license texts" and "license terms",
> > and how one really could apply the DFSG to texts, but not terms,
> > and end up with something
> > reasonable. Not really a worthy fight, of course, but if you want to
> > formalize an exception, then I think knowing the difference is important.
>
> Trust me, I know the difference; I'm one of the people who originally
> described the difference and explained how it mattered to the people
> drafting the Apache license version 2. The problem is quite specifically
> that we have unmodifiable license texts, not unmodifiable license terms.
> These texts are in Debian, making it technically untrue that "Debian will
> remain 100% free."
>
> This is approximately how I would write an exception:
>
> "Debian will remain 100% free. (With one exception for license texts,
> noted below.) ...."
>
> "Works in Debian are usually made available under specific licenses. For
> convenience, we include these (and only these) licenses directly in the
> Debian system, and we do not require that the texts of these licenses be
> Free. However, we promise that all such non-free legal texts will be placed
> in a few specific, well-documented locations, and nowhere else in the
> Debian system."
>
> This could probably be improved, but it gets the point across very clearly.
An interesting question is whether Debian will or should be admitting new
non-free texts.
Regards,
Paddy
--
Perl 6 will give you the big knob. -- Larry Wall
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