Re: RPSL and DFSG-compliance - choice of venue
On Tue, Jul 27, 2004 at 09:55:10PM -0500, David Nusinow wrote:
> 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.
They're still special case in that they're intended to disallow one
specific thing -- in this instance, choice of venue clauses. If we write a
DFSG clause which states "choice of venue clauses are non-free", then we
will likely have someone say "arbitrary termination clauses are OK because
there's no specific DFSG point to cover them, and you singled out choice of
venue clauses, so therefore you must be in the habit of listing problematic
clauses like that".
If we write the amendment as something like "A licence must not place undue
cost or inconvenience on a licensee in order to comply with the licence"
it's much broader and covers choice of venue as one of it's effects. It
also covers any other instance where the license can make it prohibitively
expensive to actually take advantage of the freedoms granted. DFSG #1 is
interpreted in such a way as to be our defence against that, but it's not
intuitive. Unfortunately it has potential side-effects and doesn't
necessarily make it clear enough that that's what's being prohibited. For
instance, "undue cost" could be argued to not apply for choice of venue
because the cost involved is not undue. On the other hand, compelled
distribution of source (GPL) could be seen as an undue cost. It's a very
difficult line to get right. Whatever we put in writing can be attacked by
those who want to either (a) get their pet piece of non-free software in, or
(b) discredit the DFSG and debian-legal by attempting to show that it/we
are trying to get rid of every licence except public domain...
It's these sorts of potential problems, IMO, which have stifled DFSG
amendments. We don't want to fuck up the DFSG with a bad amendment. It's
much easier to go with tests and interpretations of the DFSG which prohibit
such things implicitly, rather than documenting what we mean and coming up
with something that we have to be bound to.
- Matt
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