Re: [Discussioni] OSD && DFSG convergence
Steve Langasek writes:
> On Mon, Jan 27, 2003 at 09:56:00AM -0500, Russell Nelson wrote:
>
> > what do you do when someone comes along and interprets its ambiguity
> > to mean what *they* want?
>
> ... Which would be complete and utter bullshit, because Debian has never
> represented, *anywhere*, that it will package all software someone
> releases under a DFSG-compliant license.
Has Debian ever rejected software which complies with the DFSG? If
you do something in practice, other parties could rely on that. It's
just like the private road which is never closed to the public. In
time, it *becomes* public.
> Anyone who would sue Debian for such a reason is, prima facie, a
> litigious idiot who does not warrant consideration when evaluating
> whether Debian is exposing itself to lawsuits.
I won't name names, but we (OSI) have been threatened with exactly
that scenario. It is as I feared: the DFSG and OSD, although
originally the same documents, and nearly identical now, are being
used for two different and incompatible purposes.
So, are you totally against the idea of changing the DFSG even though
you probably can't find a single .deb on your machine that hasn't been
touched in five years? There seems to be a firm resistance to the
idea of changing the DFSG to reflect changing times.
--
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