Re: Licenses for DebConf6
On Mon, 14 Nov 2005 23:21:38 +1000, Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au> said:
> On Sun, Nov 13, 2005 at 06:59:41AM -0800, Thomas Bushnell BSG wrote:
>> md@Linux.IT (Marco d'Itri) writes:
>> > On Nov 13, Thomas Bushnell BSG <tb@becket.net> wrote:
>> >> I think the best reason to ask or require contributors to
>> >> licenses their papers in a DFSG form is so that Debian can
>> >> distribute the papers as part of Debian.
>> > I think this is an awful reason, considering that Debian already
>> > contains too many non-software packages.
>> I'm sorry, I was under the impression that every package in Debian
>> was software. Are you confusing software and computer programs?
> In case you hadn't noticed, for the Debian project's purposes
> software is a synonym for computer programs; if it weren't the
> reversion of the social contract would have had no effect on the
> "non-free documentation in main" question. Indeed, the secretary
> refused to allow a GR proposal to revert that policy without
> limiting the social contract to talking about free "software".
The editorial change actually had no effect on the social
contract, which is why it was called an editorial change. So, by
definition, since there was no real change to social contract,
everything that is encoded in debian using 1's and 0's is software,
as opposed to hardware or wetware.
Do not pretend that your particular interpretation is the
universally accepted one; the fact that no one objected to the GR
title means that people who were paying attention agreed with
everything is software, and people not paying attention, well. At the
very least, there are varying interpretations, and pretending there
are not does not help your thesis any.
manoj
--
Men who cherish for women the highest respect are seldom popular with
them. Joseph Addison
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/%7Esrivasta/>
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