Re: RPSL and DFSG-compliance - choice of venue
On Tue, Jul 27, 2004 at 05:56:16PM -0500, David Nusinow wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 27, 2004 at 06:27:36PM -0400, Glenn Maynard wrote:
> > I find 80% to be pretty clear. I guess you're one of the people claiming
> > that there's a silent majority secretly disagreeing with the vast majority
> > of d-legal (who can't be bothered to state their opinion and its rationale),
> > so there's no point in arguing this further.
>
> Way to ignore what I actually wrote. What I said was that most DD's aren't
> aware of the issue, which is very different than silent disagreement. DD's
> have universally agreed to uphold the DFSG, not some additional material that's
> grounded in one interpretation of the DFSG. As a result, I'd bet that many
> would be surprised when a license is declared non-free because of something
> that they did not agree to.
Your argument could be applied by one disagreeing with any nontrivial d-legal
consensus at all--and even trivial ones, like "'can only distribute on
Thursday' is non-free"[1]. It's an argument that d-legal consensus is
meaningless; I don't believe that d-legal consensus is actually so distinct
from the informed opinions of the rest of the project.
If it was, and the project as a whole really did agree that the things
being argued recently--choice of venue, license-termination-at-my-slightest-
whim, forced distribution to upstream on demand, forced archival of source
for years (GPL#3b without 3a), forced smiling on distribution[2]--are free,
I'd probably throw in the towel and give up trying to keep Debian free, because
the project would have drifted so far from my concept of Freedom as to make
it a futile effort. The "but the entire project wasn't consulted!" argument
could be applied to all of those.
If you have practical suggestions, let's hear them; otherwise this just isn't
interesting.
[1] That isn't actually a stated consensus of d-legal, of course, since no
license brought here has had that particular restriction. This is just an
example of a clause that I believe is obviously and extremely non-free, which
would be "free" by some people's black-and-white interpretations of DFSG#1,
and which I believe would reach consensus without serious debate.
[2] yes, somebody asserted that this is free
--
Glenn Maynard
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