On Mon, Dec 23, 2013 at 08:40:54AM +0200, Faidon Liambotis wrote: > On 12/23/13 02:15, Steve Langasek wrote: > I think a better way to put Marco's argument would be: "[h]acker > legal education, with its roots in programming, is strong on formal > precision and textual exegesis. But it is notably light on legal > realism: coping with the open texture of the law and sorting > persuasive from ineffective arguments". > That's from a commentary[1] by James Grimmelmann[2], that started > from a review of Biella's book and discusses the legal education of > hackers and members of the Debian community in particular. It's > worth a read. Well, I find that your quote is taken quite out of context. James seems in fact quite positive about hacker's becoming well-versed in the law, while at the same time taking a balanced view by pointing out the limits of our amateur education (the part you quote). Being a Debian developer does *not* prepare one to practice law in a courtroom. But it *does* prepare one to understand the terms of a license, which is not something that requires a professional. Determining whether a particular course of action is in keeping with the wishes of the copyright holder is not something that requires consulting a lawyer, any more than determining whether a license meets our own DFSG guidelines. These are not questions that need to be *adjudicated*, they are matters for us to decide by a careful reading of the licenses and the application of our shared principles. > I, too, believe that we could use the reality check. We already did > so with our patent policy and solved long-standing problems for our > users. Well, I'm not sure what problems that patent policy actually solved for our users. As far as I can see, our current patent policy was simply a codification of existing practice. But as for a reality check, remember that lawyers by and large only give you the answers to the questions you ask. It's very easy to ask the wrong question where the GPL's system library exception is concerned. I have seen many people ask the wrong question before, precisely because they believed they already knew the answer. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/ slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org
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