Moved to -legal. (Like you couldn't already tell) On Tue, Apr 09, 2002 at 01:36:15AM -0500, Jeff Licquia wrote: > > And I'm sorry, but that's > > quite debatable. It's quite a valid interpretation of "software" to be the > > "stuff" that's implied by all the one's and zero's in memory however those > > one's and zero's might be represented, as opposed to "hardware" which > > actually has a physical existance. In that case anything stored in a .deb > > is software, compared to, say, a book, which is fairly primitive hardware. > It's certainly debatable; the thread alone should be evidence enough of > that. > I don't find such arguments very interesting, though. It's certainly > easy to "solve" a problem by shifting the definitions around, I'm sorry, but the above isn't bending the definitions at all. Software is a broader term than program. You don't get to claim the terms work the way you use them and then think that ends everything. > bending a > few until they match. I could try to "unbend" them by asking what the > practical difference there is between printed and electronic versions of > books, Uh, you can't find a practical difference between a printed book, and a CD with the contents of that book encoded on it? Really? One fairly obvious one is that you need a computer (some hardware) to make any use of the latter, while you can read the former quite happily without a computer. > Except that most of the crypto technology you used to find on Italian > and Dutch FTP servers was either code from the USA or (rather poorly) > algorithms from the USA. The really big example: PGP. Which was, as far as the regulations were concerned, reimplemented from a text book outside the US, not exported. > > A question you could reasonably ask is "is it useful to have all the same > > freedoms for documentation that we expect for programs?" And really, it > > _is_ useful. Being able to cut out all the irrelevant bits of a document > > and distribute an abbreviated version you can store on your PDA, or being > > able to translate it, or being able to change it to match the changes in > > your program, or being able to correct it on factual errors, or being > > able to rip out bits of opinion which aren't interesting or useful to > > you or the people to whom you want to make copies are all reasonable > > and productive things to do. > I'm not sure that usefulness is a good criteria, however, for modeling > what we believe. What would you propose instead? What "feels" good? What various luminaries want? Usefulness is a very effective justification for our current requirements. Freedom's not a bad one, although it doesn't indicate why we make the concessions we do (like allowing upstream to require us to use different names, or patch files). > For example, it would have been exceedingly useful a > few years ago to link GPLed KDE to non-free Qt, but we didn't do it > then. Actually, we did do this until we realised it wasn't actually legal according to the licenses. This was nothing to do with the DFSG. Cheers, aj -- Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/> I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred. ``BAM! Science triumphs again!'' -- http://www.angryflower.com/vegeta.gif
Attachment:
pgpFEnzoQqdLO.pgp
Description: PGP signature