I'm wading into dangerous waters here, methinks... :) I think Branden's proposal is well-intentioned, but ultimately the wrong approach to dealing with this problem. I think the standard that should be applied is not about kilobytes or percentages, but whether or not the licensing restrictions on ancillary materials harm the ability to make derivative works. For example, in the case of GNU Emacs, we have the "misc" directory full of all sorts of philosophical ramblings on various topics. None of them have anything to do with Emacs; we could completely rewrite Emacs without anything there being affected. So their "non-freeness" doesn't seem to harm anything. On the other hand, if the GNU Emacs manual had a non-free license on the parts dealing with the operation of the program, then we might have a problem. At least in the case of documentation and other ancillary materials regarding software, the line seems pretty clear-cut: if the materials document something that could change as a result of changing the program, they should be free; otherwise, who cares? I realize the case of "3 pages of documentation with 100 pages of lame novella" isn't covered here; in that case, I would expect the maintainer's judgement (is the 100 pages of lame novella worth 3 pages of worthwhile text... my gut feeling says "no") to take over. If it isn't associated with software at all, ancillary materials probably don't have a place in Debian. For example, the text of Martin Luther King Jr's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" (copyrighted, non-DFSG-free) has no place in Debian, even though it is an incredibly eloquent piece of writing, because it has nothing to do with computer software. I don't know about the edge case of standards documentation, etc (doc-html-w3, for example) that I'm sure most of us would agree isn't in the same category as the acknowledgements in the GNU manuals. There's a case to be made for exceptions for things that are standards (I certainly wouldn't want people promulgating a modified version of the National Electrical Code, for example), but I think my proposed criteria wouldn't address that case, leaving it verboten as before. I realize this leaves the door open for the inclusion of great volumes of perjorative or simply annoying ancillary documentation in Debian; today "Linux-and-GNU", tomorrow "Geeks-with-Guns", next week my "great" collection of poetry I wrote in secondary school. On the other hand I can't see a fair way to include all of GNU Emacs, including the (IMHO) crap in misc, without opening the door to rafts of other crap anyway without a "if RMS wrote it, it's OK" exception that smacks of hypocrisy. And since I don't see either RMS removing that material or us excising it from our package of emacs over his objections, the only way forward is some sort of *gasp* exercise of reasonable judgment by maintainers. Chris -- Chris Lawrence <lawrencc@debian.org> - http://www.lordsutch.com/chris/
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