Re: OSD && DFSG - different purposes
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the moment, from list policy of not CCing without request, and hiding
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On Mon, Jan 27, 2003 at 04:58:01PM -0500, Russell Nelson wrote:
> Fair enough, but do you really expect people to study the archives?
> For example, Google knows nothing about "debian-legal RPSL", implying
> that you never discussed the RPSL.
The correct way of finding out if a license is DFSG-free is to ask
debian-legal. People frequently do this, even for very simple, BSD-ish
licenses (and cases that don't require discussion--the majority--generally
get a reply very quickly).
> A search of the Subject: headers
> between last July and now shows no instance of RPSL, or Real.
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2002/debian-legal-200207/msg00448.html
"RealNetworks" is in the subject, and the search on lists.debian.org
doesn't find partial matches by default.
I don't know why Google doesn't have that indexed.
> Why not change the DFSG?
There have been several good reasons explained for leaving the DFSG as a
set of human guidelines, rather than a word-strict block of legalese that
attempts to remove all human judgement from the equation.
I can't find them at the moment, though, and I'll leave the explanation
to someone who can do so better than I can.
Even if this was done, DFSG freeness isn't a guarantee that a package
will be included in Debian. For example, a game with half a gigabyte
of data, all of which is DFSG-free, would most likely not be included in
Debian; and software which has no interested Debian developer is unlikely
to get into the archive. DFSG-freeness is necessary, but not always
sufficient.
--
Glenn Maynard
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