Re: REVISED PROPOSAL regarding DFSG 3 and 4, licenses, and modifiable text

[tb@becket.net (Thomas Bushnell, BSG)]

Branden Robinson <branden@debian.org> writes:

> Well, while I find the above personally offensive and without much in
> the way of merit, I personally am a pretty radical advocate of free
> speech rights.  Outlaw hate speech today and they may decide tomorrow
> that, say, machine code isn't worthy of protection under the First
> Amendment.  Hey, wait, that already happened.

Right, but we aren't outlawing it.  We'd just be saying "Debian isn't
going to repeat that".  For us to have a proposal about what Debian
does and doesn't say, and how, is by no means some kind of censorship
of anyone.  

> It's the same kind of backsliding that I'm worried about when it comes
> to permitting invariant text into main.  To date, license texts and
> copyright notices are pretty well-defined documents with discrete
> boundaries.  The GNU GPL takes some liberties with the notion of a
> license, including a fair amount of text that isn't really terms or
> conditions, but it's still easy to deal with because it's well-known,
> widely used, easy to tell where it begins and ends, and is unlikely to
> swell to dizzying proportions in the future.

Actually, the GPL is pretty vanilla.  Eben Moglen has a nice essay on
why it's been so easy to enforce--because it sticks to well-worn
ground, instead of licenses that try to remove rights by weird implied
consent methods (such as shrink-wrap licenses).  

> I'm not sure the same arguments can be made for material which "could be
> a matter of historical connection with the subject or with related
> matters, or of legal, commercial, philosophical, ethical or political
> position regarding them."

Right, but that's not relevant here.  The question isn't whether a
court would find it easy to enforce, but whether *we* can understand
what it means and apply it in the case of Debian.  Since, unlike the
court, we are allowed to take a position and include whether or not we
agree with the statements in question, it's a lot easier for us to
deal with.

> The number is intended as a tool, a rule-of-thumb, not a straightjacket,
> and anyone who implies the latter is misrepresenting the text of my
> proposal and everything I've said about it.

Tell us a story about a hypothetical situation in which someone wants
to upload a package, the FTP master says "this goes over the limit",
and in which we then have some kind of process for deciding "ok, it's
all right in this case".  Describe how you think the conversation will
go.

Thomas