Re: RPSL and DFSG-compliance - choice of venue
On Wed, Jul 28, 2004 at 12:43:31PM +1000, Matthew Palmer wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 27, 2004 at 09:35:31PM -0500, David Nusinow wrote:
> > DFSG. I fully agree with this. If you really truly believe that your
> > interpretations are shared by the rest of the project, then you have nothing to
> > fear from this, and you only stand to gain.
>
> We fear that as soon as we special-case something in the DFSG it will be
> used as a fulcrum for splitting hairs even finer. "Our special case isn't
> banned by the DFSG, but these other ones are, so obviously the DFSG was
> intended to be proscriptive, therefore our special case is free and our
> gratuitously non-free licence should be permitted". AKA "The DFSG Arms
> Race". We keep throwing GRs around every couple of months to say "this
> sucks", and then someone who wants to play word games comes up with another
> truly non-free licence clause which isn't covered by one of the special
> cases in the DFSG.
This is true, but when the same basic ideas come up repeatedly, such as the
choice of venue clause, they're probably worth codifying, since they're no
longer special case.
> That being said, I think there are a few items of wording that need to be
> addressed (DFSG #1 in particular can be read a wide number of different ways
> depending on one's desires), and one or two extra "wide sweeping" clauses
> wouldn't go astray, but they need to be *very* carefully considered. Even
> the wording changes would likely have an effect similar to the recent
> "editorial amendments" GR.
Agreed.
- David Nusinow
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