On Wed, Jul 14, 2004 at 11:51:37AM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> Branden Robinson <branden@debian.org> wrote:
> >On Tue, Jul 13, 2004 at 04:58:50PM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> >> We shouldn't be worried about freedom from a philosophical masturbation
> >> perspective.
> >
> >I think there should be a corollary to Godwin's Law that says:
> >
> >"Whosoever compares one's opposition in a discussion to indulging in
> >masturbation shall forfeit the argument."
>
> You must admit that some amount of the argument here occasionally
> resembles vigerous handwaving for personal gratification.
No, I mustn't.
If I want to masturbate, I'll take my hands off the keyboard and put all
the people on this mailing list well out of mind. Sorry, but you guys just
don't do it for me. :)
More seriously...
I think the vigorous handwaving is mostly done by people who are serving an
agenda.
For some, that agenda is defending "freedom" as they understand it.
For others, that agenda is getting as much stuff as possible into Debian
main, the license be damned.
In the former case, I think some people may be getting goaded into fighting
a kind of rear-guard action, for they fear that you might be supporting the
ambitions of the latter group by making it obvious that the Debian Free
Software Guidelines suck as an algorithm. (This is really no surprise, as
they clearly more closely resemble a set of heuristics.)
However, if I understand your endeavor correctly, what you're trying to
accomplish is simply better reasoning behind our occasional assessments of
licenses or specific works as non-DFSG-free.
That's a good thing. I'm a big fan of careful thinking. However, I would
caution us against acting contrary to our consciences simply because we may
stumble across an occasional license or work that seems to skirt past the
DFSG threshold without actually seeming to do the community any favors.
Our approach to these matters tends to encourage license proliferation. We
can thus fully expect the professional lawyers who work for various
interests to, effectively, conduct a massive parallelized attack on the
DFSG and its derivative the OSD, and the last several years have shown that
this is the case. I'm not even saying it's a deliberate attack -- it's
just the nature of the beast. You are company X. You've heard about this
"Open Source" thing and you'd like to give it a shot. Like most companies,
you'll want to maximize your reward (hundreds, perhaps thousands of unpaid,
technically savvy employees!) while minimizing your risk (urp! These
unpaid employees might band together and do something other than what we
want them to do!). Few lawyers are going to have as a first inclination
"just use the GNU GPL, it's established and it works" to justify their
paychecks. ("What do I pay you for? Any one of those Open Source lunatics
could have told me that!")
When a license gets bounced for failing the DFSG or OSD, sometimes the
licensor goes back to the drawing board, sometimes they give up and use a
known-accepted license, and sometimes they decide the FLOSS community isn't
worth dealing with because they put up too much of a fuss when one tries to
bend them over the barrel (fortunately for them, the FLOSS community is
actually pretty acquiescent -- after all, we'd hate to be *rude* by telling
someone their license stinks!).
The end result is that there's a kind of selection process going on with
licenses. What doesn't work (what fails the DFSG) tends to die; what does
work (what passes the DFSG) tends to survive. In the presence of the
strong mutagenic agent described above (lawyers needing to justify their
paychecks indulging in NIH syndrome), we can expect to be kept pretty busy
applying our selection process.
I know I risk exasperating Matthew Garrett in particular with this
analogy, because as a Real Life Geneticist, he's amply qualified to
demolish it. :)
The main thing I don't understand in the recent discussion is that, if we
don't take personal offense at a licensor's bad license, why should we
expect the licensor to take offense if we bounce it for failing the DFSG?
Why do we act as if their time is more valuable than ours? Why do we act
as if they're doing anyone any favors by adding yet another new license to
the very complex mosaic that already exists?
New licenses *should* be met with strict scrutiny. It's better for us,
better for our users, and better for the community. Ultimately, we can
even expect it to lead to better licenses.
Of course, maybe some people think it's a *bad* thing when Debian discusses
a license with an upstream, the wording gets clarified or a well-known
license adopted instead, and mutual gratitude is expressed. (Anyone who
thinks this doesn't happen, hasn't been reading this mailing list -- or
DWN, which occasionally covers high-profile instances.)
But I don't. I find it works pretty well to treat licensors as peers and
compatriots, until and unless they prove otherwise. I don't take BS from
my peers, but I also don't presume that BS is offered deliberately, until
and unless I have enough of a history with someone to expect it.
I see no reason why upstreams shouldn't be part of that same dynamic.
(Hah, and I'll bet you thought I was using "evolve" as a transitive verb in
my Subject: line. Fooled ya! :) )
--
G. Branden Robinson | Computer security is like an onion:
Debian GNU/Linux | the more you dig in, the more you
branden@debian.org | want to cry.
http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | -- Cory Altheide
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