On Tue, Jul 27, 2004 at 09:46:00PM -0500, David Nusinow wrote: > On Wed, Jul 28, 2004 at 02:00:53AM +0100, Andrew Suffield wrote: > > On Tue, Jul 27, 2004 at 05:56:16PM -0500, David Nusinow wrote: > > > 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. > > > > This argument applies equally to every interpretation of the DFSG, and > > therefore reduces to "The DFSG cannot be applied to > > anything". Reduction ad absurdum, etc; it's wrong. > > Wow Andrew. I thought we'd gotten beyond the reductio ad absurdium phase of our > relationship. I guess not. Date somebody else. > It's only if you choose to interpret it that way. Good grief, the exact same argument repeated? > For major interpretive decisions not clearly grounded in the DFSG, particularly > for major licenses such as QPL Stop right there. This is one of the most *obscure* and *little used* licenses in the project, let alone free software in general. There are probably no more than a dozen interesting QPLed projects in existence, and the namesake Qt isn't even one of them, since we're forced to use the GPL for that. > > > I personally don't think that -legal does a good enough job of communicating > > > with the rest of the project, and I know I'm not the only one. > > > > Right, there's at least two or three of you running around and trying > > to undermine the project. Cut it out. This idiotic attempt to create > > discord is not productive; it's somewhere between trolling and > > deliberate sabotage. > > "No, don't ask questions and express opinions! Heaven forbid! You're shattering > my precious worldview!" Don't run around stirring up trouble where previously there was none. There's a major difference between asking questions and expressing opinions, and posting FUD for political goals. You did not ask questions, you stated assumed conclusions and proceeded to assign blame and use this to undermine the credibility of Debian. As this thread has aptly demonstrated, they were wrong, and if you had asked questions instead then people would have told you why. > > -legal is a fucking mailing list. It's nonsensical to say it "doesn't > > communicate with the rest of the project". Anybody can subscribe and > > follow the discussions, and there are public archives. Anybody who is > > interested should do so. This is not a cabal or a clique, the project > > is not divided into departments, and there is nothing secret about > > it. -legal exists because a fair number of people are not interested > > and wanted to get the discussions away from other mailing lists. These > > people are by definition not interested, and therefore it's stupid to > > complain that they weren't informed; they had the choice, and *they* > > chose not to. > > -legal is a relatively high traffic mailing list full of minutia and > long-winded, often difficult posts. It's a very hard list to follow for anyone, > and this makes it prohibitive for many people to contribute. Yeah, and guess what? That's intrinsic to the problem. Nobody can usefully contribute without expending a fair amount of effort. We're tackling extremely complicated licenses and they require careful analysis in order to understand their implications. When some aspect of them is determined to be non-free, it is as a direct result of that analysis. Assuming that you can comprehend them just by reading the conclusions is idiotic. If you don't want to do the thinking required, then you don't get to complain about the results when other people do it. You might as well complain that Linux is too complicated to understand, and say that people should rewrite it in under 10k lines of code. It's pretty much the same, and impossible for all the same reasons. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- |
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