On Sun, Jan 08, 2012 at 10:40:35PM +0100, Francesco Poli wrote:
> I think that this is exactly what people opposing to copyright
> assignment want to avoid: giving permission to re-license under yet
> unknown terms.
I don't think you should make absolute statements for *all* the people
opposing copyright assignments, while being yourself only one of them.
I, for one thing, generally oppose copyright assignments, but as this
discussion has made clear I've a different position than yours. Others
will have yet more different views, for sure.
I'm under the *impression* that an important amount of people objecting
copyright assignments do so to avoid the risk that their contributions
get re-licensed under terms that go against their moral beliefs about
software freedom. That is why I won't sign a copyright assignment to a
for-profit entity.
Restricting the camp to DFSG-free licenses gives already quite some
guarantees about what the license terms could be. For instance, they
won't be terms that forbid the content to be distributed as part of the
Debian archive. In other words, they won't be terms that put the content
at stake with Debian philosophy.
I understand that not all DFSG-free licenses are equal in terms of how
they represent moral beliefs of people (e.g. I'm myself more of a
copyleft kind of guy than a *BSD kind of guy). But it is the largest
horizon of software freedom beliefs we should expect from people who
have contributed to the *Debian* website. Strategically, it seems to me
that either we stick to that set of licenses, or we have to pick a
single license upfront. As mentioned by David and in my previous mail,
that would defeat the "separation of concern" goal.
> Moreover, "any DFSG-free license" is quite vague.
> Who decides which licenses are DFSG-free and which are not?
The Debian project has an official position on which licenses are
DFSG-free and which are not. I believe you know that very well.
We will all appreciate if you could avoid hijacking this discussion to
push agendas that object the current stance of the Debian project on
which licenses are DFSG-free and which are not. Those discussions do not
belong to this (already crowded) bug log.
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} . o .
Maître de conférences ...... http://upsilon.cc/zack ...... . . o
Debian Project Leader ....... @zack on identi.ca ....... o o o
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