Re: [Discussioni] OSD && DFSG convergence
ma, 27-01-2003 kello 22:09, Russell Nelson kirjoitti:
> 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.
I don't know of any free software that has been rejected from Debian,
though my memory is what it's always been, bad. However, since every
time a package is added to Debian, it requires effort on the behalf of
individuals, if no individual wants to put in the effort, nothing
happens. I doubt that even such a lawer-happy society as the USA can
require people to put in such effort involuntarily.
If I brush off the snow from the stairs in my apartment building every
day, without compensation, and one day stop, no sane court is going to
require me to start doing it again.
(Sorry about the analogy.)
> > 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.
Like someone else already said, the OSD is a definition that others can
use to decide whether their license makes their software open source or
not. The DFSG is a set of guidelines, not quite a definition, that
*Debian* uses to decide whether something is acceptable to be added to
Debian or not.
> 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.
If there are any real problems in the DFSG, I'm sure Debian developers
will change the DFSG to fix them. Debian is, however, governed by
flame-war-cum-consensus, so expect things to be quite hot in the mean
while. :)
(I haven't been convinced that the potential problems you've pointed out
so far are real problems, but it might be good to clarify the DFSG about
them anyway.)
Reply to: