Re: Ironies abound (was Re: GPL v3 draft)
On Wed, Jan 18, 2006 at 03:21:14AM +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> I'm not going to defend patch clauses. I think they're massively
> horrible things, and the world would be a better place without them. But
> deciding that they're not free any more would involve altering our
> standards of freedom, and I don't see any way that we can reasonably do
> that.
It's disappointing, then, that Debian is so fixed in stone that it's
incapable of correcting its mistakes.
In reality, I believe patch clauses are simply an anomaly that nobody has
tried to fix, and that Debian's standards of freedom are actually well
above them. The alternative conclusion is that Debian doesn't consider
freedom to reuse code significant, and I don't really think that's the case.
(In any case, not being a DD, I'm certainly in no position to attempt to
fix it, beyond bringing it up on d-l once or twice a year.)
--
Glenn Maynard
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