Re: one of the many reasons why removing non-free is a dumb idea
On Wed, Jan 07, 2004 at 12:48:01AM +0000, Oliver Elphick wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-01-07 at 00:16, John Goerzen wrote:
> > Indeed. Let us do a service for our users and provide them with only
> > the software that they can legally use, modify, distribute, and hack on,
> > together with documentation that meets those criteria.
>
> This is just silly! Software without the documentation is not really
> usable. You are plainly saying that we should cease to make this
I agree that it is a grave concern. You may note that I have questioned
this hard on -legal.
> documentation available to users because it will make Debian impure. I
> do not see any proposal for replacing it (nor would such a proposal be
> at all realistic). This is not keeping the promise we made and it is
> not in the interests of our users.
It is already planned and has already been announced as a likelihood to
happen for the release after Sarge [1].
> I do not share your absolutist ideas about DFSG purity. Inconveniencing
> users because you want to be purer than FSF is a ridiculous position.
Please read up on the FDL issues [2] before making a wild assumption
about my desire to be pure :-)
The FDL is incompatible with the GPL, which actually brings into
question the legality of distributing the two together at all,
regardless of the DFSG. There have also been documented instances when
a section was listed as Secondary when it did not meet the requirements
of a Secondary section in the license itself, thus leaving the document
in an unpleasant legal DMZ. There are also serious questions about the
legality of allowing users to download FDL documents over SSL or SSH
connections (!). It also would be illegal to use gpg to encrypt an FDL
document on your own disk or to include it on an encrypted filesystem.
In short, providing FDL documents seems to be a legal minefield not just
for us, but also our users, which is why I said in another message that
I regrettably agree with removing them from main. There may come a time
when we have to discuss whether we must remove them from non-free as
well.
Hopefully, however, the FSF will fix the problems before it comes to
that.
-- John
[1] http://people.debian.org/~ajt/sarge_rc_policy.txt
[2] http://people.debian.org/~srivasta/Position_Statement.xhtml
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