On Wed, 2 Jul 2008 00:13:06 -0700 Steve Langasek wrote: [...] > The real issue is not that you were posting without disclaimers. The real > issue is that you post to debian-legal with *content* that is inappropriate > *because* you are not a lawyer or a Debian developer. > > When someone posts to debian-legal asking for help figuring out if a license > is ok for Debian main, and you respond saying that it isn't because of > license feature X; and you are well aware that the ftpmasters have > previously and consciously accepted other licenses into main with that same > feature, and have not been swayed by your arguments; that's not appropriate. When I am aware that the ftpmasters disagree with my own personal opinion, I try to explicitly acknowledge it. See, for instance: http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2008/03/msg00089.html I am not a spokesperson of the ftpmasters: I think I am allowed to contribute to this list with my own personal opinion, as long as it's clear that I am not claiming that my opinion is the official Debian position or ftpmasters' one. > This list doesn't exist to serve as a soapbox for non-DDs to promote their > own interpretations of the DFSG, it's here to help maintainers (and > ftpmasters) figure out what packages Debian can distribute and in what > section of the archive. The description of this list states: "Discussions about legality issues such as copyrights, patents etc." If *only one* opinion (namely ftpmasters' one) is allowed, I cannot see what kind of 'discussions' can be held... Moreover, if the list is here to also "help [...] ftpmasters [...] figure out what packages Debian can distribute and in what section of the archive", as you yourself state, then I cannot understand how this could be achieved by only reporting ftpmasters' opinions... Do we have to remind ftpmasters their own opinions?!? > > When you repeatedly push interpretations of the DFSG that you *know* are > inconsistent with how the ftpmasters operate, that's an abuse of > debian-legal, regardless of how many disclaimers you stick on the end of it. Frankly speaking, you seem to consider debian-legal as an address for ftpmasters' spokespersons. If you really believe debian-legal should only report ftpmasters' opinions, then you should propose that debian-legal@l.d.o becomes an alias for ftpmaster@d.o ... At that point, nothing but ftpmasters' opinions would be given. I don't know how many answers would be given for the raised questions, though: ftpmasters don't seem to be much willing to explain their decisions. For instance, I explicitly asked for an explanation of the acceptance of CC-by-v3.0 in bug #431794, but ftpmasters' answer has been a deafening silence, so far... :-( -- http://frx.netsons.org/doc/index.html#nanodocs The nano-document series is here! ..................................................... Francesco Poli . GnuPG key fpr == C979 F34B 27CE 5CD8 DC12 31B5 78F4 279B DD6D FCF4
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