On Tue, Aug 24, 2004 at 05:56:54PM +0100, Steve McIntyre wrote: > Andrew Suffield writes: > >On Tue, Aug 24, 2004 at 03:01:37PM +0100, Steve McIntyre wrote: > >> > >> And it's not what he's claiming at all, as you well know. debian-legal > >> currently includes a large number of people who are on the more > >> extreme end of the range of licensing opinions expressed within > >> Debian. > > > >Irrelevant. debian-legal represents only the group who are interested > >in licensing issues. > > > >Obviously that will include "extreme ends", because anybody who is not > >interested by definition cannot be such a person - if they exist > >anywhere, they will do so here. That's a stunningly useless > >observation. > > Thanks. Written in your typical patronising fashion, of course. That's > half the reason why a lot of people don't/won't take part in > discussions here. Unsubstiantiated assertion. Also unlikely, and a cheap attempt at dismissing a point without answering it, and an inexplicable use of "patronising"; I suggest you consult a dictionary. I'm not sure what you think it means, but it makes no sense here. [Out of order to save repeating myself] > >Classifying an entire group as being equivalent to the person in that > >group who you personally find most objectionable - well, that's just > >dumb. > > Not when the group is dominated by the objectionable people... And again. > Membership (and, more importantly, participation) in a mailing list > does not just depend on interest. It also depends on the amount of > time and effort that people have available to devote to the > discussions. Start filling their inboxes with fruitless discussions > and only the most interested, most committed people with the most time > to spend will remain. As Debian people already tend to have extreme > views in terms of software licensing, that means we only end up with > the most extreme of the extreme views represented here. People with > strong opinions out at the other end of the arguments will generally > not have got this far. So we end up with arguments between the middle > and one extreme. That's where we are today. I see no connection between this paragraph and the real world. Most of the people on -legal who participate in the important stuff are also critically short of time and tend to skip over useless threads. Most of the useless threads are the responsibility of "outsiders" who just won't listen, and who would rather argue a point than do anything about it (even when action is easier than arguing about it). So if we assume the rest of your argument holds true, the most you can say about that is that they're a (perhaps unintentional) effort to sabotage the work of -legal. "Extreme views" here is a meaningless term and an tasteless attempt at demagoguery. I've tolerated it this far, but enough is enough; please grow some manners. The validity of a viewpoint is not determined by how close it comes to some end of an arbitrary scale. I haven't seen any arguments between arbitrary "middle" and "extreme" points on the scale in a long time, either. So I don't know where you are today, but it's not here. > >> But it's a great help in terms of understanding the meanings of lots > >> of the *legal* license terms that are bandied about. And how they > >> might be applied in court, with precedent. And in this case > >> professional training is much more important than in the others you > >> named IMHO. > > > >I see absolutely no justification for that opinion. It seems equally > >valid for all the other cases. > > In the other cases precedent and precise meaning are not so > important. If we make a programming mistake, we have a bug. It can get > fixed. If we make a mistake in terms of helping an AM, we can > apologise and try again. In legal terms, we can get sued if we make > mistakes. Why do you *think* we always tend towards the paranoid viewpoint? You seem to be arguing at cross-purposes with yourself now; the objection is that we classify too much as non-free or non-distributable, and yet you argue that our approach is invalid because we might accept something as free that we *shouldn't*? If you can hire us a lawyer (and thereby invoke the defense that if their advice is bad, it's their fault and not ours), it's possible that we can sail a little closer and accept some things we've previously rejected. Absent that, you have just given the reason why we *must* reject things that we are not certain about. If we didn't have -legal, we would have to reject every new license for fear of being sued. As it stands, we can accept some of them. Complaining that there exists a possibility that we reject some things we shouldn't is neither relevant nor useful. And that's not even on the map for the cases that people bitch and moan about the most - these are the cases where the license is clear but not DFSG-free. Lawyers cannot help there. So, correcting your statement in light of all this: In legal terms, if we make a mistake we can always include the package at a later date. Again, there appears to be no difference between this and the other cases. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- |
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