Re: Inconsistencies in our approach
Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> On Thu, 31 Jul 2003 16:38:43 -0700, John H Robinson, IV <jaqque@debian.org> said:
>
> > as a mostly passive observer at this point, the only data we are
> > missing is a clear working definition to separate out Software,
> > Data, and Documentation.
>
> My feeling is that there may not be any such clear cut
> distinction.
i am going to try to take a stab at it:
hardware: physical computing devices
software: logical information stored by hardware devices that can be
used for computation.
this allows us to break software into three (or more) areas:
program: software that provides instructions to hardware
data: input to software
documentation: information about software or data
Drawer 'O': software that does not fit in the above three categories.
this allows us to neatly sidestep the whole issue, because _online_
documentation would fit in one of the above four categories of software.
Debian Will Remain 100% Free Software[0]. so if we never include dead-
tree documentation as part of Debian, then we can easily and safely
apply the DFSG to any bit of program/data/documentation/Drawer 'O' that
is ever uploaded to the archive.
[0] Debian Social Contract, Point 1.
<URL:http://www.debian.org/social_contract>
comments welcome.
credit to Sergey V. Spiridonov for inspiring the above idea.
-john
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