Dear Listmasters, Francesco Poli has been a longtime subscriber to the debian-legal mailing list. He has quite extensive knowledge about licensing, and is often the first person to answer inquiries about new licenses sent to the list. However, he also consistently, repeatedly uses the list to tell people about his personal positions on licenses where these disagree with the position taken on behalf of the project by the Debian ftp team. He has done this for years, and for years people (including myself) have been asking him to stop. Francesco Poli is not a Debian Developer. His refusal to stop using debian-legal as a soapbox for telling everyone who asks a question about licenses about how he thinks the ftpmasters are wrong is an abuse of this list which makes the list significantly less useful for its *intended* purpose of examining new licenses, promulgating license information to new packagers and upstreams, and discussing questions of the overall legality of software in Debian. By making his disagreement with the ftpmasters the subject of any thread in which the pertinent licenses are discussed, he sows confusion about the status of these licenses, whose status in Debian is otherwise not at all ambiguous. Since Francesco has made it clear that he has no intention to stop his abusive use of debian-legal (see below) or even recognize why his behavior is problematic, I am asking the listmasters to ban him from this mailing list. Francesco, if you want to get Debian to *change its position* on licenses where you think an error has been made, please start a discussion in an appropriate forum such as debian-project and Cc: the ftp team. debian-legal is not and never has been the place to get changes made to the policy for the ftp archive, and your continued use of the list for espousing your *personal opinion* on questions that have been settled *for years* from the project's perspective is actively harmful and must stop. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/ slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org On Sat, Aug 31, 2013 at 03:46:32PM +0200, Francesco Poli wrote: > On Tue, 27 Aug 2013 14:37:24 -0700 Steve Langasek wrote: > [...] > > You have a right to your own opinion. You do *not* have a right to express > > it *on this list*. The purpose of this list is to provide guidance to > > maintainers and upstreams regarding *Debian's* definition of free software, > > as well as guidance regarding the *legality* of particular combinations of > > works. You using the list as a soapbox for your opinions about licenses > > that you think Debian *shouldn't* accept is an abuse of the list. > Sorry, but I think I am *not* abusing this list by just expressing my > own opinions on the acceptability of licenses. > The description of this list says [1]: > "Discussions about legality issues such as copyrights, patents etc." > [1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/ > There cannot be *any* discussions, if, for each given topic, only *one* > opinion is allowed to be expressed, and any other dissenting opinion is > banned.
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