Re: GUADEC report
On Tue, 6 Jul 2004 18:31:34 -0400, David Nusinow
<david_nusinow@verizon.net> wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 06, 2004 at 08:43:06PM +0000, Thaddeus H. Black wrote:
> > > Some companies feel that various licenses were
> > > genuine efforts to be DFSG free ...
> >
> > Maybe some companies should genuinely stop
> > trying to invent new free licenses. Still, if
> >
> > (a) they feel that they absolutely must have
> > their own private buggy licenses, yet
> >
> > (b) they sneer at debian-legal, where the best
> > expert advice in the world on this topic is
> > freely available to them,
> >
> > then how much more can we can do to help them?
> > If they want to play the game, they need to
> > learn the rules first. I do not seem to have
> > any trouble producing DFSG-compliant software,
> > after all, and neither do you. Why should they?
> > Because they have lawyers?
> >
> > Debian is a shining beacon. In the end, they
> > will follow us. To a remarkable extent, whether
> > they realize it or not, they already do.
[none of the above snipped, because I can't find a single shining
example of arrogance among it -- the whole thing is arrogant, in my
opinion]
>
> This smacks of arrogance. Most -legal participants aren't lawyers, and as such
> have no formal training in actual legal matters. Believe it or not, such
> training does count for something. The point should be to cooperate with these
> people and have actual discussions, not beat them about the head and shoulders
> with ideology that they probably don't understand. This is the sort of thing
> that Matthew is reporting about, and it's also the reason for the recent
> backlash against -legal from within Debian itself.
You said that better than I would have, if I had fallen to my
temptation to reply to Thaddeus. I agree 100%, and with perhaps more
emotion.
I do have a question.... on an individual package-by-package basis,
who does have final say as to whether or not it follows the DFSG? The
developer who packages it? The Release Manager? Upstream?
>
> - David Nusinow
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