On Wed, Oct 01, 2003 at 02:53:21PM -0600, Barak Pearlmutter wrote: > Well this is good. So we'd agree that, as a practical matter, we > should not file bugs about snippets, not worry about them, not talk > about them, and just leave snippet-related issues to the discretion of > individual package maintainers. You're putting words in my mouth (again). If it appears that a piece of material in Debian main, large or small, may be licensed non-freely (or not licensed at all), then a person is entitled to file a bug about it, and the matter should be taken seriously by the maintainer. If it appears that a piece of material in Debian main, large or small, is missing copyright and/or licensing information, but can reasonably be construed to share the same license terms as the other material in the package, then there is nothing to worry about until and unless some person steps forward to claim both copyright and an infringement thereof. > This is how I'd describe what we've > done in the past, so if you think that is a continuation of current > and historic Debian practice then we agree about that as well. You seem to be proposing that we deliberately close our eyes to DFSG problems we may encounter, as long as the problem encountered is "small". I am proposing that we not embark on a comprehensive audit of every byte in Debian main. I suggest that we not interpret the absence of a copyright notice or license terms on a file not be interpreted as a priori evidence of non-DFSG-freeness, or a lack of licensing altogether. As I said before, each case will have to be judged ad hoc on a case-by-case basis. We do not have the manpower to do a comprehensive audit of Debian main, and furthermore the Free Software community, particularly historically, has not been so assiduous about licensing issues that every questionable case we might encounter could be quickly resolved one way or the other. We will have to be content with imperfect knowlegdge. I do not understand why it is such a struggle for you to understand my position. -- G. Branden Robinson | Debian GNU/Linux | If existence exists, branden@debian.org | why create a creator? http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
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