Re: A summary, if an opinionated one
Hi,
>>"Jules" == Jules Bean <jmlb2@hermes.cam.ac.uk> writes:
Jules> This summary won't be as professional looking as Manoj's are, but I want
Jules> to condense a few points:
Jules> 1) Free standards are desirable
Jules> We seem to more or less all agree on this.
Jules> 2) Non-free, but still distributable standards, should be distributed
Jules> The value to debian of including the standards it follows is high. It
Jules> outweighs their non-freeness. This is in some sense analogous to the PGP
Jules> situation. The value of PGP outweighs its non-freeness, but we will
Jules> switch to GPG soon. Similarly, if and when free standards emerge which
Jules> replace our non-free ones, we will switch.
Jules> 3) Free licenses are desirable
Jules> Although there are some protections in law, in some countries
Jules> (possibly all)
Definitely not all, the united states for one does not grant
any special protection to license documents.
Jules> which allow derived licenses in some way, there seems to be no
Jules> reason not to make this explicit. Therefore, we should
Jules> encourage free licenses. Perhaps we should try to persuade
Jules> RMS that GPL3 should be free.
Jules> 4) We *must* distribute licenses with our software
Jules> So non-free licenses are going to be in main, to the extent that they
Jules> accompany software.
__> egrep 'COPYING|GPL' /var/lib/dpkg/info/*.list | wc -l
34
__> ls -1 /var/lib/dpkg/info/*.list | wc -l
1376
Most packages merely refer to /usr/doc/copyright/GPL; which is
shipped separately in base-files. I think base-files can be split to
allow a required copyrights package that goes in verbatim. I see no
reason to give that package a special dispensation.
Jules> So, I see a clear similarity between the two situations. And
Jules> I suggest that standards which are non-free do not go into
Jules> main, but go somewhere else, yet to be determined.
Jules> We must now, IMO, consider the issue of 'free content', and
Jules> whether or not debian distributes what I shall call 'works of
Jules> art', and if so, in which section.
I thought we were leaning towards verbatim.
manoj
--
Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of
society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded
responsible thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government,
eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy
the male sex. Valerie Solanas
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@acm.org> <http://www.datasync.com/%7Esrivasta/>
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