Re: DFSG FAQ (draft)

[Thomas Hood <jdthood@yahoo.co.uk>]

On Wed, 2003-07-16 at 15:42, Barak Pearlmutter wrote:
> > >  Q. How can I find out if there are known doubts about the freedom of
> > >     a particular package in Debian but for some reason they have not
> > >     yet led to it being removed from the archive?
> 
> > I agree that this is an important Q&A to have.
> 
> This is arguably covered in the answer to "what is debian-legal" at
> the top of the document.  Does this extra material provide more
> information?  It just says that debian-legal is where we discuss this
> kind of thing, which is already (I hope) clear.

The phrase "known doubts" needs some explanation, I think.
I suggest the following.

   There are no knowns.  There are things we know that we know.
   There are known unknowns - that is to say, there are things
   that we now know we don't know but there are also unknown
   unknowns. There are things we do not know we don't know.
   So when we do the best we can and we pull all this information
   together, and we then say well that's basically what we see
   as the situation, that is really only the known knowns and the
   known unknowns.   And each year we discover a few more of
   those unknown unknowns.

To these immortal words of D. Rumsfeld, we need only add:

   Having been discovered, the unknowns are no longer unknown,
   but have become known knowns.  And this causes us to have
   doubts.  There are things that we know we doubt, and things
   that we doubt we know, and ...

--
Thomas Hood