On Thu, Nov 18, 1999 at 09:59:59PM -0600, John Goerzen wrote:
> > > We must not help software based on a BSD-licensed kernel no less
> > > become more prevelant. The reason is that the BSD license allows
> > > companies to commercialize the product. I for one disdain the idea of
> > > using SPI resources to help things that will become proprietary.
> > I have a different emotional stance on that but it doesn't matter.
> > DFSG doesn't discriminate between compliant licenses and BSD license is
> > certainly DFSG-compliant.
> This is irrelevant. DFSG was introduced solely because we needed a
> way to evaluate non-GPL licenses of standard packages for inclusion in
> Debian. As you'll note if you were to read the license itself,
> circumstances forced us to allow some software to pass the test even
> though we dislike it and it probably shouldn't.
You'll note that nowhere has Debian actually given an opinion about BSD
style licenses being better or worse than GPL style licenses. You'll
note, therefore, that your opinions are no more authoritative than the
people who actually want to work on Debian FreeBSD (or whatever they
want to call it). In fact, you'll note they're *less* authoritative,
since you're not doing the work and they are.
Further, I'd be curious as to how you think someone'll take a Debianised
system and make it proprietry. dpkg and apt are both GPLed.
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. PGP encrypted mail preferred.
``The thing is: trying to be too generic is EVIL. It's stupid, it
results in slower code, and it results in more bugs.''
-- Linus Torvalds
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