On Fri, 12 Jan 2007 21:53:50 -0800 Jeff Carr wrote:
> On 01/11/07 12:27, Francesco Poli wrote:
>
> > You seem to be happy with free programs whose documentation is
> > non-free.
>
> Well now, I'm not like that. It's not up to me if the authors choose a
> NC clause.
Of course, it's not up to you to decide which license other authors
choose.
But it's up to you to say "I like that license" and "I don't like that
other"...
> It's at least allows PDF's to be sent and people that can't
> afford to purchase a physical book can at least have access to the
> book. If I had to choose between an author using a completely closed
> license vs a CC with NC one, I'd choose the latter.
So would I, probably.
But I would try hard and find alternative DFSG-free documentation in
both cases.
I mean, those situations are both proprietary and not OK, IMO.
> That doesn't mean
> I'm what's stated above.
>
> > I don't think it would make sense to separate legal issues from
> > freeness ones.
>
> Well, it's important for when you have to deal with the lawyers.
>
> > Why? Because they are often intertwined together: you cannot be
> > sure the important freedoms are granted, if you don't take the legal
> > context into account.
>
> I'm not sure I follow you here. I think I'm stuck in my own head
> thinking about times when paying $500/hour that the last thing I'd
> want to enter into is an endless debate about the "freeness" of
> anything. Usually, you want to get in there, focus on the law and the
> facts and get out. Not that I don't like talking to lawyers :)
I don't follow you either: nobody here is paying 500 $/h to anyone else,
AFAIK.
Lawyers are welcome on debian-legal whenever they are willing to
contribute to discussions in a constructive manner.
They are really appreciated, especially when they shed some light on
obscure law details and oddities. But, of course, they are appreciated
when they help to discuss freeness issues in a legally sound way, as
well.
If you create a debian-dfsg list and say "lawyers: go to debian-legal to
discuss legal issues; free software supporters: go to debian-dfsg to
discuss freeness issues", the situation you'll obtain will look like
this:
* debian-dfsg will lack legal experts to correct wrong statements that
sometimes are written by non-lawyers (like me)
* debian-legal will only be useful to discuss issues on
distributability ("can we distribute this package through the non-free
archive?"), copyright/trademark/patent infringements, and the like
I think the effectiveness of debian-legal would be decreased by a
similar split.
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..................................................... Francesco Poli .
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