On Tue, Mar 18, 2003 at 05:21:55PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote: > Sure; it's a plainly stupid idea. No one's seriously advocating it, > and it doesn't benefit anyone. Please at least come up with examples > that are vaguely _plausible_. [...] > Which is to say: sending your tax return to someone when you change a > program is not a reasonable thing to do. As such, it's not a reasonable > thing for a license to require you to do. So, you'd propose as components of a Debian Free Software Definition that software be licensed in ways that are not: 1) stupid; or 2) unreasonable My problem with this (implicit) proposal of yours is that it's practically tautological. Hardly any Debian Developer is going to accept as DFSG-free a license that he feels is "stupid" or "unreasonably", and hardly any licensor is going to use one that he feels is "stupid" or "unreasonable". That leaves licensors and the Debian Project with precious little in the way of objective grounds upon which to evaluate the terms of a license. I think that, when rejecting a license as non-DFSG-free, we need to be able to say something more about than "it's stupid" or "it's unreasonable". Thus my proposal of adopting the FSF's definition of Free Software, with an as-yet unarticulated fifth freedom that has something to do with privacy. -- G. Branden Robinson | The last Christian died on the Debian GNU/Linux | cross. branden@debian.org | -- Friedrich Nietzsche http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
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