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Re: Choice of venue, was: GUADEC report



On Mon, 12 Jul 2004, Florian Weimer wrote:
> There is an attempt to change the DFSG through various "Tests".

The tests themselves are not an attempt to change the DFSG, since
(quite clearly) they fail to actually do so.[1] Their purpose is to allow
the rights guaranteed by the DFSG to be confirmed in simple easy
tests.

However, in the end, the results of those tests are related back to
clauses of the DFSG that are failed.

> Some of them make sense, some of them are just arbitrarily designed
> to exclude specific licenses (or even specific software!).

As far as I am aware, none of the tests have been designed to exclude
a specific license. They might have come up originally during a
discussion of a specific license as a means to understand why the
license is not free, but for the ones that I have been intimately
involved with, no secret cabal[2] has decided that a specific license
is not good enough for Debian and invented a "This license is evil"
test specifically to exclude it.

Could you perhaps explain the reasoning behind this statement?


Don Armstrong

1: Although, you might consider everyone who is using these tests an
idiot who wouldn't know how the DFSG is changed; hopefully that's not
the case.

2: Unless the voices in my head count as a secret cabal. Even then,
they didn't make such a decision.
-- 
Quite the contrary; they *love* collateral damage. If they can make
you miserable enough, maybe you'll stop using email entirely. Once
enough people do that, then there'll be no legitimate reason left for
anyone to run an SMTP server, and the spam problem will be solved.

Craig Dickson <crdic@pacbell.net>

http://www.donarmstrong.com
http://rzlab.ucr.edu



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