Re: Proposed vote on issue of the day: trademarks and free software
Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> wrote:
> Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org> writes:
> > That is a head-in-sand attitude.
>
> Well, that's certainly blunt and honest, but it probably unfortunately
> makes it clear that there's no room for discussion if your first reaction
> is that negative. I don't think it's any more a head-in-sand attitude
> than to expect my neighborhood association to not waste its time on
> resolutions about the war in Iraq, regardless of my personal opinions on
> the topic. Even if there's someone who lives in the neighborhood who's an
> Iraqi veteran.
It also looks like there is no room for discussion with the above
position, because it seems to prejudge that any matter not obviously
immediately directly related means a group "wastes its time".
I'd hope that the association has ways to prioritise things so that
resolutions about the war in Iraq don't hinder the neighbourhood
management unnecessarily, but it seems fine to me if such an
association wants to take a position on the actions of wider
governments. In my own experience, the village council of which I'm
currently a member has no power over local or regional building
projects or health or major highways, but frequently takes positions
on them. They're all handled by larger organisations, but these
things affect our community and merely taking a position can help our
community. I think that's similar here: the debian project taking a
position on this could help our community.
Arguing that the debian project is necessarily only packaging and
distributing software and mustn't ever do anything else seems rather
narrow. Vote against if you don't like the position; argue against if
you want to influence the position; please don't simply argue it's
off-topic because the growing attempts to use non-copyright
restrictions clearly affect free software and so are on-topic.
> [...] 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? Getting SPI to make a statement against software
patents seemed to get someone arguing at the last minute that SPI
shouldn't do such "activism" - even though SPI has a long-standing
position against swpat!
The debian project has a process for making statements. If people
don't like that, there's a way to remove or limit the power in future.
There have been frequent questions about (and misdescriptions of)
debian's position about using trademarks to bolt down free software.
I believe developing an agreed statement on this is a good move.
Regards,
--
MJ Ray (slef)
Webmaster for hire, statistician and online shop builder for a small
worker cooperative http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ http://mjr.towers.org.uk/
(Notice http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html) tel:+44-844-4437-237
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