Re: The Spirit of Free Software, or The Reality

[Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au>]

Bas Wijnen <wijnen@debian.org> writes:

> The "problem" that nobody mentioned it may be caused by the fact that
> nobody really considers those icons non-free,

The copyright holder of those icons does not, AFAIK, grant restricted
license for recipients to modify and redistribute the work.

That makes those works non-free by my reading of the Social Contract.

> and so having them on our users' machines isn't a problem. But then I
> agree with Ian and Mike, we should just ship them in the package.

Distributing them to Debian recipients makes the implicit promise that
they are free by the DFSG, or that they should be removed from Debian if
that's discovered to be untrue.

So the above seems to argue either that search engine icons are
sufficiently important that we can violate the Social Contract, or I've
misunderstood. I'd like to know exactly where that misunderstanding is.

-- 
 \       “The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold |
  `\       in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think |
_o__)             differently.” —Friedrich Nietzsche, _The Dawn_, 1881 |
Ben Finney