Re: Suggestions of David Nusinow, was: RPSL and DFSG-compliance - choice of venue
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. But of course you'll find some clever retort to that
point too, I'm sure.
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.
>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...
>> 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.
--
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. steve@einval.com
There's no sensation to compare with this
Suspended animation, A state of bliss
Reply to: