Don Armstrong wrote:
On Fri, 03 Feb 2006, olive wrote:there are several licenses which have some small problems (choice of venue, etc...) and that are declared non-free; Debian should make a clearer difference between small and big problems.Licenses which do not comply with the DFSG do not comply with the DFSG, and therefore cannot be included in main. There are clauses which only just barely cross the line, and there are clauses which can't see the line at all. When we discuss them, we can discern between the two cases, but it's not appropriate for Debian to bend its own guidelines to allow in works which do not meet the requirements of the DFSG simply because we think it would be nice to include them.
Once again if a license clearly fail the DFSG I will never advocate to include it. But there are a lot of case where this is not the case and I think people claim that the license violates the DFSG just because they do no like it. There is no rule which say that "every bits of a file can be modified"; but there are law which says that you must be able to use your freedom. Debian has already accepted resctriction similar to the GFDL (acknoledgement of the BSD license etc,...); the invariant sections are in nature not more (these are acknoledgement for the GNU project; and yes it a bit longer).
By the way, there are licenses which in my opinion more clearly violates the DFSGL and are nevertheless accepted. I think of a license of a file in x.org which prohibit to export it to Cuba. This seems clearly be a discrimination and moreover it fails the dissident test (even if in this case the dissidant might be a U.S citizen; not a chinese one). For someone (like me) living outside the U.S. this is even more flagrant because to export goods to Cuba is perfectly legal from my country.
Olive