On Wed, Apr 07, 1999 at 01:52:59PM -0400, Andrew Pimlott wrote: > I just saw the item on slashdot.org that the Free Software foundation has > updated its definition of free software > (http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/free-sw.html). The changes seem to have > come out of RMS's recent essay (which I swear I read on-line, but I can't > find for the life of me) that appeared in "Open Sources". I don't have a > diff, but the new document is generally excellent and contains some > called-for clarifications. > > Reading it, two trends occured to me: The FSF is making its free software > definition more precise; and many Debian members want to make the Debian > Free Software Guidelines (and the proposed revisions) less complicated. I > think we should take a cue from this and consider unifying the two. > > I understand that this defies the conventional wisdom that there should be > one statement that conveys the spirit of free software (the FSF's), and > another that defines in specific terms what is free software (the DFSG). > But read RMS's definition carefully--it's actually quite precise. With a > few annotations, I believe it would do everything the DFSG (including > proposed revisions) seeks to do. And you can't deny that it reads better > than the DFSG. > I like that document very much. However, I think Debian needs something a little more explicit to use to base decisions on what goes into main. For example, would button-ware (like the (old?) Zope license) be Free Software? It requires all web pages have a (something like) "created by zope" button for the pages it creates. DFSG says (or will say) no but I didn't see it clearly denied in the GNU paper. > At any rate, I believe that efforts to simplify the DFSG should draw > inspiration from the updated FSF definition. Definatly... -- Please cc all mailing list replies to me, also. ========================================================================= * http://benham.net/index.html <gecko@benham.net> <>< * * -------------------- * -----------------------------------------------* * Debian Developer, Debian Project Secretary, Debian Webmaster * * <gecko@debian.org> <secretary@debian.org> <lintian-maint@debian.org> * * <webmaster@debian.org> <gecko@fortunet.com> <webmaster@spi-inc.org> * =========================================================================
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