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Re: [RESULTS] SURVEY: Is the GNU FDL a DFSG-free license?



On Sat, Aug 30, 2003 at 04:39:05PM -0700, Matt Taggart wrote:
> IMHO This is _not_ appropriate for debian-devel-announce. It's not a soapbox, 
> please keep your messages purely informational in the future. (If I haven't 
> critizied others for doing the same thing, sorry. Maybe it was because your's 
> stuck out in some way. Either way it's no excuse.)

There's been plenty of editorializing going on in previous "Bits from *"
mails to debian-devel-announce in the past.  I am therefore not sure
that everyone shares your understanding of that lists's charter.

While I probably could have dressed the window differently, the
corollary question of "so why are we applying the DFSG to the GNU FDL at
all?" did need to be covered for people to have a complete picture of
what's going in the Project.

I offered what appeared to me to be the prevailing wind on that
corollary, because it is a fundamental assumption underlying the survey
itself.  As I pointed out, the only proper democratic way to find out for
sure is to subject it to a General Resolution.

I decided to post to d-d-a mainly so that I could not be accused of
confining discussion on this volatile issue to some backwater within the
Project.  If the Project is going to rise up and strike down the
heretics that have overrun debian-legal, now is their chance.  They can
no longer claim ignorance.

If, on the other hand, the views of the people on -legal generally
reflect the views of the Project as a whole, or if the Project is
willing to leave license analysis to the nerds on -legal, then we'll
soon know that as well.

The bottom line is that it's a provocative issue, and it ties into the
very value judgements upon which this Project was founded.  I seriously
doubt that any such message can be made "purely informational", at least
not until we have some sort of equivalent of a public legislative record
of our past decisions.  Given the way we operate, most of the time I
doubt we'll have such a thing.

-- 
G. Branden Robinson                |    As people do better, they start
Debian GNU/Linux                   |    voting like Republicans -- unless
branden@debian.org                 |    they have too much education and
http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |    vote Democratic.       -- Karl Rove

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