On Wed, Sep 12, 2007 at 06:35:18PM +0200, Pierre Habouzit wrote: > I did not took any kind of position on the matter in that thread yet. > But to make you happy I will: there is little point in shipping rfc's > that are mirrored everywhere on the interwebs, and rfc's are clearly > non-free, and do not end up in the final binary package. So there is no > point in no stripping them from the source package as it's not near > being burden for the maintainers, who after all, are the ones that > suffer the "most" of that decision. If nothing else, RFCs shouldn't be shipped in arbitrary packages - there are packages containing nothing but RFCs, and including individual RFCs in other packages is needless duplication. Having packages available (whether in non-free or otherwise) can be useful in terms of having a local copy of the document, but not so vital as to ignore any licencing issues, since (as has been mentioned) they are distributed elsewhere. Also, distributing them without permission to modify them, just because "nobody will ever want to modify them anyway" doesn't really make sense to me. The vast majority of people will never want to modify artwork, or fonts, or other media included in packages, but still Debian requires them to be free because some people might. For that matter, the majority of people will never want to modify any program that they run, but Debian still requires them to be free. Most people will never want to modify RFCs, but some people might (or, at least, create derivative works, translations, etc.), so they should be required to be free or they should stay in the non-free section. -- Benjamin A'Lee <bma@subvert.org.uk> http://subvert.org.uk/~bma/ "It's hard to live up to your principles. If it were easy, your principles probably aren't worth a damn anyway." - Mark Pilgrim
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