Matthew Garrett wrote: > Josh Triplett <josh.trip@verizon.net> wrote: > >>"The opinions of debian-legal" consist of the opinions of all those >>developers and non-developers who participate on this list. This is not >>a closed list. If the opinions of some developers diverge from the >>opinions on debian-legal, then those developers should start >>participating on debian-legal and expressing their opinions. > > Yes, in an ideal world that would be the case. In the world we live in, > people have been intimidated away from participating in debian-legal > because of the debating style and perceived extremism of certain > participants. Refusal to acknowledge that is likely to end up leading to > debian-legal having no influence whatsoever. That is unfortunate. As far as I know, the only "debating style" on debian-legal is "be prepared to debate logically, and not just assert". I certainly acknowledge that various members of debian-legal hold extreme positions on various issues, but I tend to believe that the collective consensus is more moderate, albeit biased by self-selection towards those who care about legalistic issues. Regardless, I can personally vouch for the fact that debian-legal is approachable by non-developers, at least if you lurk and observe for a while first. :) (IANADD, IANAL.) >>I believe the situation in the Dissident test is that the laws of the >>totalitarian government are irrelevant. The Dissident test triggers if, >>when the dissident finally leaves the jurisdiction of the totalitarian >>government, some copyright holder can say that the actions they took to >>maintain their privacy violated the copyright license, by the laws of >>non-totalitarian governments. > > Ok. Why do we consider this worse than the GPL's requirement that source > be distributed with binaries? A pragmatic disident isn't going to hand > out source to people that he wants to run the software - there's more of > a risk of it being traced back to him. A written offer isn't much better > if it has his name on it. The GPL makes it harder to be a political > dissident than the BSD license does. Why have we drawn the line there > rather than in a place that would also exclude the GPL? Source is no more identifying than binaries, if you are really trying to conceal yourself. Those with sufficient skill could certainly analyze either. Also, nothing in the GPL requires the written offer to include a name, just some method of making the request. Furthermore, the safer option for the dissident would probably be to simply distribute the source alongside the binaries, and have no further obligations. > (I'm going to be fantastically unconvinced by "We drew it there because > we can't allow the GPL to become non-free") I strongly agree. - Josh Triplett
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