Re: Proposed vote on issue of the day: trademarks and free software
Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> wrote:
> [...] I'm arguing that we should not take
> positions on general political matters around free software that don't
> affect us. [...]
The Mozilla Foundation and Corporation approaches to trademarks have
affected us repeatedly in the past. There are also other examples
which have affected us, such as ion3 and probably others if anyone
wants to go dig around in the archives. So that part of the argument
doesn't seem relevant here.
> >> [...] The individual members of Debian are quite capable of joining
> >> multiple organizations, including ones who specialize in making
> >> statements about free software as a concept and tackling issues such as
> >> this one. [...]
> >
> > Care to name some?
>
> The FSF is an obvious example.
Most individual members of the Debian project cannot join the FSF. The
FSF offers a fundraising campaign called "associate membership" but
that is not joining in anything similar to the debian project. (I
think a few DDs are full members of FSF, but it's not generally true.)
So, no alternative organisations have been named. The Debian project
is one of very few groups where ordinary free software developers can
issue (draft and decide) such a statement about what's affected their
project and users.
Hope that explains,
--
MJ Ray (slef)
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