Re: Authority and procedures of debian-legal
On Sun, 06 Feb 2005, Glenn L McGrath wrote:
> For debian-legal to abide by Debians Social Contract, i think
> someone should be attempting to "exhaustively list non-free
> restrictions".
This would involve the formation of a definition, instead of a set of
guidelines.
> I think a vote should be required, and the DFSG changed before
> debian-legal assumes the right to impose any new restrictions.
debian-legal isn't the group that imposes restrictions. Its entire
purpose is to assist the ftpmasters and maintainers in determining
whether a piece of software is Free under the DFSG, to help
maintainers communicate with their upstream to get software released
under a Free license, and to discuss other legal issues affecting
Debian.
That being said, you're still looking at this from the wrong
angle. We're here[1] to preserve our freedom to modify and distribute
modified software, not to sacrifice useful freedoms to include
anything in Debian.
While we should tie everything we can back to specific clauses and
interpretations of the DFSG, there's no reason to allow software that
is clearly non-free into Debian simply because it artfully avoids the
letter of the DFSG.
Don Armstrong
1: I hope that's why you all are here anyway... as it's one of the
reasons I am.
--
It seems intuitively obvious to me, which means that it might be wrong
-- Chris Torek
http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu
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