Re: handling Mozilla with kid gloves [was: GUADEC report]

[MJ Ray <mjr@dsl.pipex.com>]

Here's the interesting thing: are the summaries trying to be
everything to everyone and that's why they don't work?

Francesco Poli wrote:
> When I find out some useful or interesting piece of software (i.e.
> program or documentation or music or ...), I try to determine its
> (DFSG-)freeness. [...]

So far, so good. That's the interesting question for most of us.

> Thus having a collection of past discussion summaries *is* useful, IMHO.

I can see how a good collection of summarised discussions can help.

> [...] I try to approach its copyright holders and
> persuade them to change license.
> In order to be more credible when I point out the issues that makes a
> license non-free [...]

Here's the flip. All of this talk of a licence being free or
non-free doesn't directly answer the question of whether the
software is free. Even convincing people isn't the core question.
I've found when making my licence notes that there are licences
with grey areas, licences which could be used for either free
or non-free software without too much effort.

> > Do the long licence summaries do much besides fuelling the project
> > red-top's debian-legal hate campaign?
> I think that the absence of summaries is even worse, because, I suppose,
> debian-legal hate campaigners are often not very interested in legal
> details: as a consequence, long (and difficult to follow) threads with
> no summarized conclusions would seem even more obscure and opaque
> to them.

Isn't making it more opaque to the hate campaigners a good thing?
It would reduce them to empty "I don't comprehend debian-legal"
rumblings instead of being able to point at something which
suggests to the innocent "look, these people are going to ban
Mozilla and the entire Linux kernel from Debian".  The problem is
how to make it still useful to the rest. Gerv's recent grumble
has given me some ideas.

-- 
MJR/slef
Maybe My Opinion Only