On Wed, Mar 05, 2003 at 05:08:08AM -0500, Simon Law wrote:
> > Sure. Why don't we adopt RMS's? That would be my first vote.
> I always thought that the FSF's (and RMS's) Four Freedoms were
> always the basis of the DFSG.
The Four Freedoms actually came well after the DFSG. According to
web.archive.org, they seem to have been added to the GNU website sometime
between December 1998, and April 1999. Coincidentally, that was about when
we were looking into writing "DFSGv2" see [0], which was to be a far more
definitive document [1].
Of course, you could say that the four freedoms always _were_ the basis
of the DFSG, and we just didn't realise it at the time...
Cheers,
aj
[0] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1998/debian-devel-199811/msg01944.html
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1999/debian-devel-199901/msg00159.html
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1999/debian-devel-199903/msg00055.html
[1] As a consequence, this was pretty much the time when we decided that
we wanted to go with flexible guidelines, rather than writing
everything we thought about freeness down, and sticking to it
precisely.
An interesting snippet is:
``If we replace the whole thing, we'll have another year of little
surprises. And the project has become more legalistic since then,
so it will be harder to just ignore the effects that don't make
sense. At least the DFSG is so vague that no-one can insist on
following its literal words.''
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1999/debian-devel-199902/msg01990.html
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
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