Re: Defining 'preferred form for making modifications'
Thomas Hood <jdthood@yahoo.co.uk> writes:
> The focus on human preferences tends to end up either in subjective
> assessments or in speculation about what other people prefer.
> Should these questions be settled by conducting surveys?
There's nothing wrong with subjectivity -- note that the debian-legal
process is based on a subjective analysis of licenses. That analysis
is grounded in the DFSG, but it's inherently (and intentionally)
subjective, very much unlike, for example, the OSD.
If it were possible to turn the DFSG into something objective, it
might be appropriate to argue the merits of doing so, and then come up
with a new, objective, DFSG. But that's a considerably more ambitious
project that anyone's suggested, and I doubt you'd find many people
who think it could even work.
I think "preferred form" makes a lot of sense. It captures the spirit
of the idea, it preserves the inherent fuzziness of the issue
faithfully, and doesn't try to answer questions that are very, very
hard to answer in the abstract but generally trivial under specific
circumstances.
--
Jeremy Hankins <nowan@nowan.org>
PGP fingerprint: 748F 4D16 538E 75D6 8333 9E10 D212 B5ED 37D0 0A03
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