Re: Suggestions of David Nusinow, was: RPSL and DFSG-compliance - choice of venue
On Sun, Aug 08, 2004 at 06:57:03PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote:
> [I am not subscribed to -newmaint.]
>
> On Fri, Jul 30, 2004 at 08:37:40PM +1000, Matthew Palmer wrote:
> > For that matter, I'm not quite sure we should necessarily be subjecting
> > applicants to the joys of rigorous licence analysis. We have d-legal for
> > this purpose just so maintainers don't have to be licence experts. The
> > question about Pine licencing is a pretty good test of basic DFSG analytical
> > ability.
>
> The trouble is, some of the same people who are excused from doing rigorous
> license analysis during P&P proceed to style themselves as licensing
> experts and spitefully ridicule the people who *do* do the hard work on
> debian-legal. We've seen great many examples of this over the past few
> months.
>
> Count me in favor of increasing the amount of licensing-oriented material
> in P&P. In my opinion, we want new developers to more easily grasp the
> facts that:
>
> 1) sometimes subtle issues are involved when trying to understand a license;
> 2) even licenses like the BSD and GPL represent compromises with "pure freedom"
> 3) phenomena like "moral rights" (droit d'auteur), software patents, and
> regulations on cryptography can cause a given work under a given license
> to be de facto licensed differently in different jurisdictions that
> Debian cares about
It can be really tough to test NM's who are not native English speakers
about licensing issues. Legal text is very different from colloquial
English, and non-native speakers are often completely overwhelmed.
Hell, even native speakers have difficulty understanding licenses like
the graphviz license.
Making sure an NM grasps the gist of the DFSG is reasonable, but
actually getting them to understand the subtleties involved is
frustrating at best.
--
You win again, gravity!
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