Re: Debian Weekly News - August 19th, 2003
On Sun, Aug 24, 2003 at 08:53:24AM -0500, John Goerzen wrote:
> I was responding to your post at
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2003/debian-devel-200308/msg03193.html,
> which among other things appeared to assert that everything in Debian is
> software, and that I am "willing to compromise the freedoms of their fellow
> developers and our users". That I objected to strongly, as it is most
> certainly not the case, nor has it ever been for me.
Perhaps I should explain at this point what I was and am trying to do.
Being aware that discussions had been held regarding the GFDL's
DFSG-freeness for a long time, one thought that occured to me was: is this
even the right approach?
Towards that end, a couple of things occured to me: 1) documentation is not
actually software, and 2) if we assume that every bit of data in Debian is
Software, then we are distributing non-free software all over the place
(especially wrt license statements).
Neither of these seem good alternatives to me. The fact that the GFDL
discussion has taken these 2+ years already is a good indication that
applying the "software" guidelines to documentation has not been as
straightforward a process as it should (granted, there were other obstacles,
but I don't think they can account for all that time by themselves).
My goal in this is not to devise some scheme whereby the GFDL or the RFCs
get back in main. I want us instead to come up with some more concrete
guidelines -- even if they are just "here's how we apply software rules to
non-software items on debian-legal". That, I think, will make it easier for
everyone to be able to judge the acceptibility of non-software items,
without getting an answer like "read 5000 messages and then check back with
us."
I fear that my attempt at first to try to stay clear of the particular GFDL
aspect of this led to some confusion, and for that I do apologize. My time
also has not allowed me to participate as fully in the discussions as I
would have liked, and again I apologize for that.
One thing that is clear is that even from people that agree that
documentation is software (at least for the purposes of the DFSG), there is
not a uniform way of applying the DFSG to that software. And THAT is a
problem even if you disagree with the remainder.
-- John
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