On Tue, Sep 02, 2003 at 10:51:43PM -0700, Bruce Perens wrote: > Regarding non-free stuff in Debian and the GFDL, both sides are making > the _same_ mistake: > > Debian, a Free Software organization, isn't being entirely true > to the Free Software ethos while the non-free file tree is so > close to the rest of the system. Changing that is mostly an > administrative issue, and need have little technical effect. The > fact that Debian developers have reviewed this multiple times, and > that it has been the way it is since I was project-leader, > doesn't mean it's not broken. > > FSF, a Free Software organization, isn't being entirely true > to the the Free Software ethos while it is promoting a license > that allows invariant sections to be applied to anything but > the license text and attribution. FSF is not Creative Commons: > the documentation that FSF handles is an essential component of > FSF's Free Software, and should be treated as such. In that light, > the GFDL isn't consistent with the ethos that FSF has promoted > for 19 years. Send that license to Larry Lessig and provide Free > Software licensing for Free Software Documentation. This is not an accurate representation of the two positions. Non-free is up in the air for purely administrative issues, and has been for a few years; we simply haven't got around to making a decision on the matter yet. It'll hopefully happen in the next few months; it was stalled behind the voting system amendment for years. The FSF, on the other hand, have explicitly stated that they have no intention of even discussing the GFDL issue with us. > Now, can we please see some work on this, rather than bickering? We're progressing on the non-free issue just fine, although the causality chain which leads to it is extremely non-obvious. We need a GR to determine what to do about non-free. However, before we can do that we need to pass the GR about modifying section 4.1.5 of the constitution. Unfortunately, the original two proposals highlighted a flaw in our voting system, which left us unable to resolve the issue. This how now been corrected, but it took years - which is much longer than anybody expected. The GR for disambiguating 4.1.5 is currently in "discussion". We can do nothing about the GFDL issue, because RMS won't talk to anybody who doesn't think it's free (because they are "hostile"). -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- |
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