Re: Please advise regarding DFSG compliance of WPL-2
On Mon, 18 Feb 2019 at 22:49, Ben Finney <bignose@debian.org> wrote:
>
> Giacomo Tesio <giacomo@tesio.it> writes:
> > 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.
>
> That's not what Joerg proposed. It doesn't need to be perfect, it needs
> meet only the lower bar that the party publsihing that text stands
> behind its meaning as accurately representing their communication.
>
> In the absence of that, it's not for anyone else to authoritatively
> claim that they have an accurate representation of the license author's
> meaning. So it's a problem that can only be addressed by the license
> author/publisher.
>
> Publishing a translation, while simultaneously saying “this translation
> can't be relied on”, is totally worthless for a legal text with precise
> meanings.
First, the meaning of any legal text is only really established in court.
That's is well known under Common Law, but it's true in Civil Law too
through what is called the "interpretation of the Law" performed by
the Judge.
Obviously the interpretation is not arbitrary, the Judge repond of it
to higher autorities and (at least in theory) to the people, but
looking for "precise meanings" of a legal text, like if it was a
program that the court execute, is simply wrong (at least for now).
It's not by chance that Marcus Tullius Cicero wrote "summum ius,
summa iniuria" way before computers were conceived.
The Waqf GPL states:
> This is the informal English translation of Waqf General Public
> License. Anything but the Arabic version of the license has no
> value except for convenience of our English speaking users.
> When we talk about the License we refer to the Arabic version,
> which is the only one we officially offer, we will try our best to
> make other translation as accurate as possible but because
> of the nature of human languages we use one single reference
> language.
Just like the LiLiQ licenses for French, it simply states that
- the autoritative version is the Arabic one:
- a Judge, whatever his language, will have to hire an Arabic
translator, can't rely on the English translation provided
- the English text has been done "for convenience of English
speaking users" and that the licensor trie their "best to make
other translation as accurate as possible", so
- an English speaking user can reasonably expects to
understand the message from the English version.
- a Judge will very likely take into account any interpretation
issues due to errors in the translation distributed by the
Licensor and mitigate any violation reconducibile to such
errors.
In no way it states that the translation is "rubbish" as Joerg called it.
It also explicitly states that, to Licensor knowledge,
the "translation represents what they want to communicate".
This seems entirely sensible from a legal and political perspective.
If Debian doesn't have the resources to read with non English licenses
and thus evaluate their conformance to its definition of freedom,
there's **nothing** wrong with it.
But there's nothing wrong into writing non English licenses for Free
Software, either.
So, don't you think the DFSG should simply state this condition clearly?
Giacomo
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