Nathanael Nerode wrote:
"olive" <olive.lin@versateladsl.be> wrote:I personnaly think that Debian would do better to defend free software ifthere were in accordance to the FSF.I personally think that the FSF would do much, much better at defending free software if they operated in accordance with Debian. Debian-legal has proved better at guaranteeing the FSF's 'four freedoms' in practice than RMS, what with the GFDL and all.
It's true that I find the GFDL not "ideal" (which in my opinion is different from non-free) and it is a shame that it has been adopted by the FSF. However it is not because another person have done a mistake that it become an excuse to do the same thing. On the last years, Debian have had a tendency to declare non-free license that are declared free or open source by everyone else and I think it will lose its credibility if it continues on this way. Both the FSF and the opensource movement have understood the difference between non-ideal and non-free license but Debian apprently did not.
Let's face it: the FSF didn't create a full free-software system. Debian did.
Debian mainly package software done by others. There is few if any software copyrighted by Debian. To say that Debian "create" an operating system is greatly exagerated. Although this packaging is important and make the software more accessible; it is not in my view the most important thing. I could, with some effort, install Linux from scratch myself but I would be totally unable to reprogram all the GNU software. This is true however that FSF leadership can be discussed since there are many important softwares on a typical GNU/Linux distribution are not from GNU (xorg, KDE, Linux, etc...).
Olive