On Thu, Aug 07, 2003 at 11:01:06PM +0200, Wouter Verhelst wrote: > Are you 100% sure whether all Debian Developers agree on that? If so, > I'll shut up. I am pretty certain that for any given statement, you will find at least one Debian developer who will not agree with it. That path has no end. > > If your goal here is to expand Debian's definition of "free" to > > include things which are not currently acceptable, > > You can't know whether it's currently acceptable. Erm, are you seriously trying to say that the FDL is acceptable? Have you been paying attention to the objections people have been raising? I've seen less objectionable licenses from commerical software. The "FDL problem", as you put it, is that the FDL is a crappy license and the FSF won't talk about it. I'm not sure why you think including non-free non-software in Debian will solve this. > Although I can't come up with an example, > I don't think it's impossible that there are some Debian developers out > there who earn their living by providing non-free documentation for the > free software they write. I'm pretty sure there are many developers who earn their living by writing non-free software. I don't see how either of these are relevant. > > then you are > > essentially trying to fork the project. > > Either way, a fork is a possible outcome. If this disagreement does not > find a compromise, it is not unthinkable that some people would > eventually get fed up, and fork into something that does accept the FDL > as a Free license. > > In fact, if the debian-legal group were to decide all by itself that > software and documentation are essentially the same thing, I'm afraid a > fork would be much more likely. Hmm, this has potential. We might be able to get rid of some of the lunatic fringe this way. > > If not, then I don't see the > > point in wading through all that bureaucracy just to stay in one > > place. > > We wouldn't be staying in one place. By doing what I propose, we would > know our opinion as a group. Right now, all we know is what some of us > think personally, but that will not get us anywhere. I remain confident that Debian will not abandon its founding principle and join the herd of distributions that lack any distinguishing characteristics. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- |
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