Re: Constitutional issues in the wake of Lenny
On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 11:06:49PM +0100, Kurt Roeckx wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 08:13:05PM +0100, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> > This is an interpretation of the SC, not the DFSG, and a perfectly valid
> > position statement.
>
> That can be seen as an interpretation of SC #4 (our priorities are
> our users and free software). But I don't see it offer an
> interpretation for SC #1 (Debian will remain 100% free).
Not that it matters anymore now (what with the vote being over and all),
but:
"remain" is not the same thing as "become". Etch wasn't 100% free;
neither was sarge, and with woody we had similar problems. I wasn't
around for the potato release, so I can't speak for that one.
The point being, this seems like progress toward a goal that Debian be
100% free software.
It would be possible to interpret the SC as a description of a utopia to
which we want to evolve; one which we've not quite arrived at yet, but
where we very much would like to get.
For clarity: I'm not saying that any of the above represents my personal
opinion. The point is, language isn't math, and as a result the same
text will often mean one thing to one person, and something entirely
else to another. This is why legalese exists; to remove as much
ambiguity as possible from a legal text, those texts are written using
formulations that are well-defined in the context, or that do not have a
lot of ambiguity to start with.
--
<Lo-lan-do> Home is where you have to wash the dishes.
-- #debian-devel, Freenode, 2004-09-22
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