On Tue, Aug 18, 1998 at 10:40:37PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote: > >> The verbatim section can help. We may decree that every > >> official CD contain a verbatim dir, which has *at least* the package > >> that contains the copyrights. > > Joseph> I believe still this is a bad thing. If we're going to do > Joseph> anything we should it with advocacy rather than trying to > Joseph> make some really bad PR real fast for Debian. > > I think your conclusions are not justified by past > experience. The DFSG did not generate bad publicity for Debian fast; > and both these efforts are an expression of what we, as a project, > deem acceptable and desirable. No, we can all agree that Free Software is important. It seems like a very good split as to whether or not every collection of words included on the CD (licenses, standards documents, lg) or else they can't be accepted into main. Saying that these things should instead go into a "verbatim" section is going to complicate things greatly. Arguably there is not enough content that would belong in this section to warrant dists/slink/verbatim/binary-all (it would have to be binary-all considering..) ISSUE: What should be done with packages which happen to include some content which is software and some content which is documentation. The software is free because it's software and the documentation is "submit any changes you'd like upstream but don't distrubute modded versions" to protect the integrity of the document. Then what? Are you going to tear apart a package in main that shouldn't be torn apart just to put the document portion in a verbatim dist? Tearing apart such a package might not be technically sound and would be giving others free ammunition to use against Debian and free software in general. Does policy even allow recommends on packages in main to packages outside main? I would argue that in my above example suggests may not be suitable. ISSUE: People talking about putting licenses in this verbatim dist should Stop Right Now. We can't legally do that in many cases and we should not be doing it at all! Besides, I have already pointed out that because of what a license is, it CAN be modified with or without permission and applied to another product. Take the BSD license, we have seen 2, 3, and 4 clause versions. The 4 clause version is of course the actual BSD license, but the 2 and 3 clause versions are used because people don't like that 4th clause and don't want it to apply to their software. The BSD license grants no permission to do this. If it were copyright violation to change this license, then ANY package under a "BSD style" license which isn't the full advertising clause version of the BSD license would not be able to be part of Debian. Think about that and how much software you would be removing. How does that affect PR? > And while I do agree that PR is important; I would not let PR > dictate the policy rhtather than technical merit; and what we feel is > right. See above. There are at least two very good reasons why this is a bad idea. Technical, legal, and political. Not to mention the common sense argument that creating slink/verbatim for just the tiniest handful of packages and saying from then on that we will happily allow and distribute non-free docs if they're in that section is probably a bad idea. And creating a main/verbatim section would leave them in main anyway, resulting in absolutely no change other than making a big deal over something we cannot realistically affect at this time.
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