Re: Please advise regarding DFSG compliance of WPL-2
On 15317 March 1977, Giacomo Tesio wrote:
Best: Someone (read: License author) could publish a translation that is
not
saying "I'm rubbish".
Are you sure that it's entirely possible?
No idea.
It's not always possible to perform a lossless translation between two
human languages, and I'm not sure if having two not perfectly
equivalent licenses is such a best practice.
LiLiQ licenses, for example, are written in French and the English
translation is NOT authoritative
CeCILL, also a french one, is good in french AND english...
French wasnt the best example. :)
Nah, don't come up with another. I'm sure there are tons of licenses in
something different than english. There may be even useful ones.
(Also, I personally doubt we do need yet another license in whatever
language. We do have ENOUGH of them to chose from).
Also, legislation varies both in times and places anyway so this
policy might just be unfair (if not discriminatory) for people outside
the US sphere of influence.
Legislation is different anywhere, yes. And no, we are not able to judge
against all possible systems, obviously. We do try to keep major points
that we know off in mind.
It's not just Arabic: what about licenses in Russian, in Chinese or
Kiswahili?
Same story. It's not actually a point against arabic, it's one thats
equally valid for nearly any language on this planet. If there is a
license in $random language and it states that all translations are
rubbish, it has the same trouble. We don't need examples that use
entirely different alphabets. :)
Maybe Debian doesn't have the human resources to be "fair" in this regards.
But if licenses in Debian must have their authoritative text in
English, shouldn't it be noted somewhere in the DFSG?
No. Because the DFSG lists something inherently unchanging and entirely
independent from the human resources doing stuff. The inability of
current members of a team in Debian to read and understand a random
language and legal foo around it is (not so, but comparably) easily
changeable.
--
bye, Joerg
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