Re: {debian-legal} Re: Final Draft: Interpretive Guideline regarding DFSG clause 3
Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au> writes:
> On Wed, Dec 12, 2001 at 11:14:04AM -0800, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote:
> > Quite right. I think we should look at the statement, and decide on
> > that basis whether we want to carry it.
>
> So, if I write a manpage for, say, mutt, and include an essay about
> how the GPL is a much better licenses than the BSD thing because I
> don't think enough people understand that, should Debian accept it or
> not? We mightn't have a problem with the screed, but if it takes up half
> the man page it could be awkward. What if it only takes up 5% of the
> totals docs, though?
My proposed guidelines, which don't pretend to the legal precision
that Branden prizes, refer to whether the amount of text is a large
chunk.
> What about a rant that goes the other way, about
> how the GPL sucks? What about one that talks about why "free software"
> beats "open source" any day? How about vice-versa? How about one that,
> instead of talking about the need for free documentation, talks about
> the need for better quality control/assurance in free software?
Well, saying the GPL sucks is, generally, contrary to the Debian
Projects goals. Debian is essentially neutral on "free software"
v. "open source". Debian is in favor of quality control and assurance
technologies.
> How about we use doc-debian for this? Put all the political screeds that
> are really interesting and famous and historically valuable and so on
> in that package, and then only let those documents appear in invariant
> sections.
>
> Another problem with the FDL: you can't rip out a single invariant section
> from a docco and publish it on its own, you have to take all of them.
Ah, here's a clever idea. Well, I think it's clever:
Create a new package in the main archive. It contains invariant text,
among other things. FDL manuals (or others) that have invariant
sections just get put in doc-debian.
The intention of FDL invariant sections is to piggyback political
commentary on manuals, predicated on the assumption that the political
commentary is "not too much" and "not enough to worry about" (more or
less a paraphrase RMS's words). What many (including me) are worried
about is that something quite different is going on, or could be: a
big manual is being hijacked to carry a political message, and (for
various reasons) it makes various people uncomfortable.
So instead of going along with the statement "the political thing is
just a small bit, not worth worrying about", let's say "it's a great
deal worth worrying about; we don't think it impacts freeness, but it
does warrant placement in a special 'political' category".
So let's call this new package "debian-political". It has whatever
political messages Debian has chosen to put in its archive. It goes
in main; if it gets too big, we can split it into parts. Of course,
we would not print just anything in debian-political: if a political
message is greatly offensive to Debian, we would not want to carry
it. The right place for the emacs manual is then in the
debian-political package.
This reverses the slight-of-hand that RMS wants to try. Instead of
letting him declare "this isn't much, don't worry about it", we would
say "oh no, politics is so important that having any (invariantly) in
a manual completely dominates its character; if you want to hijack,
you've done it!"
The manual then goes in debian-political. I insist that
debian-political would still belong in main, but it might perhaps be a
good idea to prohibit other main packages from depending on it; they
would be required to only use "suggests".
Thomas
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