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Copyright explanation on the new website



Hi,

Seeing the notice on d-d-a, I took a look at the new website. It looks
good. I expect the stuff behind it is good as well.[0] :-)

I'm not sure if the explanation of free software[1] was on the old site
as well. I now read it anyway. And I have some remarks about it:

It starts with a statement that "open source" will be discussed. At the
end, I'm left with "so where was open source discussed"? If you expect
people to know what open source is, there's no need for such a long
explanation of free software; if you don't, you should probably say it's
the same, without saying that it will be discussed.

On the line "Software companies are looking to protect their assets so
they only release compiled code (which isn't human readable)" I would
add "and [therefore] cannot be changed by programmers" in the
parenthesis. For people who don't know about programming, this feature
is much more understandable as a problem than the unreadability.

For the licenses, I would add a 1-line description about them:
GPL - Does what is described on this page; it keeps the code free for
all users
BSD - Is like public domain, allowing users to take the code and make it
non-free
Artistic - Actually, I don't know what features it has. Should it be
here? Does it do something that GPL and BSD don't do?

In the end, about selling the software, it isn't made very clear that
anyone who buys a CD is allowed to sell copies of that. It sounds more
like the X "problem", where anyone can get the code from the X
consortium, but in general what is sold uses proprietary licenses. Of
course, since the page is about all free software, this is sometimes
(such as with X) indeed possible.

On the last line, it would be good to explicitly mention that "contrib"
and "non-free" are not part of the "main" distribution (and that we do
distribute those as well).

If you (or whoever decides such things) agree with my points, I'm happy
to write a patch for the page. If you like this, please point me to the
source that the patch should be written against.

Thanks,
Bas Wijnen

[0] That remark is mostly frustration with a new website at my job,
which has an insane administration interface. :-(

[1] http://www.debian.org/intro/free

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