On Wed, Apr 13, 2005 at 02:00:43PM +0200, Javier Candeira wrote:
This is the point that helix touched upon that most concerns me: I
acknowledgte that the GFDL and the CC with the forced -by clause are
non-free, but I also think those two projects have too much people-momentum
and mindshare to just give them the shoulder with the "non-free for you!"
treatment.
Only the trolls have ever advocated doing that. The right answer to
"this package has a non-free license" is not "remove it" or "move it
to non-free", it's "get it released under a free license". License
issues should be considered like any other bug; the people who claim
"declaring this non-free means removing it from the archive" should be
treated no differently to those who claim that filing RC bugs means
removing stuff from the archive. Just fix the bugs instead.
At this point we're fairly sure that RMS is determined to be non-free
(his responses can be effectively summarised as "I'm not talking to
you" and "You wouldn't understand" - I'm not kidding, he refuses to
discuss the matter with anybody who doesn't agree with him), but
there's no good reason why almost everybody else using the GFDL
shouldn't be using a free license.
There are efforts in progress to get both the GFDL and the CC licenses
fixed. The GFDL one is being stalled by FSF internal politics; we can
do nothing about this. The CC one is too new to have shown results
yet.
I would like to see an approach towards FSF so casting, identifying (and
promoting by Debian as our choice) particular combination of GFDL terms
that is DFSG-compliant, and the same with a CC flavor. We could call them
Debian-approved-GFDL and Debian-approved-CC (but maybe not to their faces).
This is a fallback position, if the first efforts fail. -legal knows
more or less how to do it, but nobody can be bothered to go to the
effort of constructing them just yet, since it's premature, massively
time-consuming, and license proliferation is to be avoided wherever
possible.
Maybe the solution would be a Debian Free [Documentation|Media] Guidelines,
but I admit to being equally ignorant of the details about the current
situation and stumped about how to fix it.
After long consideration, -legal has been unable to construct any such
document that is not equivalent to the DFSG. There's no particular
opposition to the notion per se, but so far as we know it just can't
be done (without simply permitting blatantly non-free stuff). We've
worked out a stock set of questions for anybody who proproses allowing
something in that isn't already allowed:
1) Why should it be allowed in for this work?
2) Why should it not be allowed in for every other work?
(Failure to answer this question indicates that they really want
to modify the DFSG to permit more stuff for everything; that's a
different subject entirely)
3) How do we distinguish between works where it should and should not
be allowed?
Generally they fall silent at this point.