On 2003-09-12 17:43:49 +0100 Fedor Zuev <Fedor_zuev@mail.ru> wrote:
Since Robinson, Nerode and other free beer zealots does not show, AFAIK, any clear-cut principles of freedom (and Robinson explicitly declines that DFSG is a sufficient definition), any attempt of FSF to make compromise with them will be pure waste of time.
I'm curious: I have been on this list since early this year and have read a significant proportion of the last two years of archived messages, but I have not yet got the impression that the people you name are "free beer zealots". Rather, they seem to be "freedom zealots" if anything. Do you have any evidence to support your description?
I thought DFSG was widely regarded as a toolbox of checks to perform. The explanatory wording on the social contract page (that is, the additional description rather than the actual terms) confuses matters a little. Any group using the DFSG unchanged as a definition of free software will surely encounter numerous problems.
For many of us, the principals are the FSF's "Free Software Definition". That is a better *definition* (although it suffers from a verbatim-reproduction-only copyright licence and an apparent retcon about what is "software") but it is not a set of tests. We would need to design tests based upon it. Recreate the DFSG? I suspect it would look like the DFSG, but I could be wrong.
For comparison, it would be interesting to know exactly what tests FSF perform when classifying licences. I do not think that info is published anywhere at present. Past statements have been along the lines of "sb meditates upon it and then decides".
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