Re: RPSL and DFSG-compliance - choice of venue
On Tue, Jul 27, 2004 at 11:11:59PM -0400, Glenn Maynard wrote:
> I don't mind discussing them. I'll admit to not caring to discuss six
> things (several of which seem to me to be self-evidently non-free, such
> as arbitrary termination) simultaneously.
That's definitely fair (and I fully agree with you on the arbitrary termination
point).
> > 2) Steve McIntyre has continually suggested codifying the various things in the
> > 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.
> There's certainly something to lose from this being done incorrectly. An
> amendment saying "The license may not require a choice of venue" would
> inevitably set a precedent: for every other weird restriction that we see,
> the person trying to push it into Debian would say: "Hey! You had to have
> a GR and change the DFSG to call choice of venue non-free! I demand a GR
> for my 'say the Pledge of Allegiance' restriction, too!" I'm not really
> against it in principle; it's just the side-effects that worry me. (I
> keep seeing assurances that it won't come to that, but I really havn't
> been very reassured.)
This is a totally valid concern, and I'm glad it keeps coming up, but I don't
feel like it's enough to paralyze any attempt to modify the DFSG. I'm
definitely against haphazardly modifying foundational documents (and the recent
GR showed many ways how such a thing should not be handled) but at least
attempting to do so might be warranted.
> > 3) As I stated earlier, I liked the news post to DWN. Keep those up for big
> > things like new tests and interesting new interpretations.
> >
> > 4) Announce major changes to things to -devel-announce. If a major license is
> > declared as non-free, announce it to -devel or -devel-announce (maybe the
> > -devel first in order to allow dissenters to weigh in before going for the
> > broader -devel-announce).
> >
> > 5) Possibly start -legal-announce for summaries and such
>
> I don't have a problem with any of this, but this is all after-the-fact
> stuff: things to do after a big discussion, forming a list consensus, and
> writing summaries. It sounds like what you want it things to happen to
> draw people into the discussion before we find ourself at a consensus
> (that's certainly better than doing so after, since that results in the
> discussion rebooting).
This is true. They're just some ideas I'd had floating around right away, and I
don't have any ingenious ideas for bringing people in at the start of the
debate, mainly because doing the sort of work -legal does is very hard (at
least to me).
One possibility for something like -legal-announce would be to post an initial
mail like "Someone has requested that foo license be reviewed for package bar.
This license also applies to packages bas, etc". This would let people
subscribe to a low volume list, and if anything they're interested in goes
under review, they could join the discussion. I could see posting these things
to -devel or -devel-announce, but this strikes me as rather ugly.
- David Nusinow
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