On Wed, Sep 04, 2002 at 05:24:30PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: > Thomas Bushnell, BSG <tb@becket.net> writes: > > Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> writes: > >> Even if Debian is not violating the intended license directly, to base > >> a stance on the viewpoint that the license is legally uninforcable and > >> therefore irrelevant seems rather disconcerting. > > Are you worried that we would be violating it indirectly? > That's most of what I was trying to say. The questions of whether the > license are acceptable are a separate issue to me; the main point that I > feel strongly about is to evaluate the license on its own terms, rather > than on the basis of whether it's worded so as to give people a legal out. What does it mean to evaluate a legally-binding document "on its own terms", if not to evaluate in terms of the legal requirements? You say that it would be rude for someone to ignore Knuth's request. But the aim of the DFSG isn't to protect our users from being perceived as rude; it's to protect them from civil suits and criminal prosecution. Granted, there are other, loftier goals that the DFSG aspire to, but I don't think anyone could argue with a straight face that the framers of the DFSG held "never be rude to upstream developers" as one of these goals. In cases where Debian's legal interpretation of a license differed from that of the copyright holder, we have in the past removed packages from the archive because of the possibility of a lawsuit. However, if Knuth really meant "public domain", then in this case there is no copyright holder at all. Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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