On Mon, Apr 07, 2008 at 06:50:45PM +0200, Julien BLACHE wrote: > So, I'll tell you right away that, though I haven't made up my mind > just yet, I think I'm going to bypass the clickthrough starting with > Lenny.
That would be very nice. > Also things are getting better on the hardware support side, though > we'll still see the occasional "scanner head bumps against case". Ah, ok. I though the hardware damage was just theoretical. If it's real, a warning would be appropriate IMO. > > Indeed. And it is obviously his right to not remove it from his > > distribution, but Debian doesn't need to suffer from authors with weird > > "Weird ideas" that, in this case, aren't weird at all. I did confirm > his issue is legitimate with other german developers. So what is the issue exactly? That he might be liable if the user didn't accept the license? Wouldn't that also be true for the rest of the GPL'd software in Debian? > > click-through. But if he releases it as free software, then we have the > > right to remove that. And IMO we should do it, too. > > Because we have the right as per the license text doesn't mean we have > the *moral* right to do it. It's a distinction that's important to me. OK, that's reasonable. IMO being allowed to change such things is the main point of free software, though. "Freedom is about being allowed to do things that others don't agree with". As long as upstream agrees with what we're doing, we're not actually using the freedom of the license. That's good, of course. But IMO we shouldn't be too scared to use it when it's really needed. > > - If this is intended as a legal safeguard, then please refuse to annoy > > our users with this nonsense and remove it in the Debian package. As > > There's another issue that you're not getting. When discussing this > issue, this point came up: it's possible to use a GPL app without > accepting its license. In this case, the clickthrough makes it clear > that the user accepted the license and is now bound by its terms. How does that make a difference? The warrenty disclaimer is a notice, not something the user accepts (AFAIK). It just informs the user that there is no warrenty. I don't see the point in explicitly accepting that. If a user wants warrenty, they should get upstream (or whoever is providing it) accept that they are providing it, not the other way around. But IANAL, and I could be wrong on this. > > you're saying that being friends with upstream is more important than > > delivering a good distribution[1]. IMO this goes against our Social > > I really don't like what you're writing here, While I didn't intend to be very nice, I'm sorry if it came out too harsh. It wasn't intended as such either. ;-) > If we can assemble a distribution this size with as few as ca. 400 > active developers (FSVO active), it's precisely because we have, most > of the time, good to excellent relationships with upstreams. I fully agree. And I think these relationships are important. But if upstream is asking us to do things which we, as Debian, agree are not the way to go, then IMO we should do things our way. It's preferrable to do this in a way that allows us to remain friends with upstream (and we certainly shouldn't make upstream feel like we put them in danger of being sued), but that doesn't mean we have to follow them on everything. It should have been possible to work out a way to do what we want (getting rid of the click-through license) without annoying upstream. But appearantly we don't even have to do that much for that anymore. > If our relationships with upstreams were as bad as what we've seen > with cdrecord, mozilla, ion3 or you name it, we'd be in serious > troubles True. However, in those cases it was a good idea to not follow their wishes/demands IMO. A good relationship with upstream is worth a lot, but not everything. > Anyway, I am amazed at the attention this clickthrough is getting. I think it has to do with what I wrote about how I feel about legal stuff: I want to avoid it whenever possible. With Debian, I can do that (as a user) without getting in trouble. Debian maintainers will make sure that things are acceptable, and users don't have to check for themselves. Such a click-through shows how things are in the evil outside world where maintainers don't do this dirty work for the users. I don't want to go there, and appearantly I'm not alone. :-) > There will probably be an XSane upload closing this bug in the > upcoming 2-3 weeks. It's on my TODO list, but I have a couple of > things planned before I can get to that. Cool. Thanks, Bas Wijnen -- I encourage people to send encrypted e-mail (see http://www.gnupg.org). If you have problems reading my e-mail, use a better reader. Please send the central message of e-mails as plain text in the message body, not as HTML and definitely not as MS Word. Please do not use the MS Word format for attachments either. For more information, see http://pcbcn10.phys.rug.nl/e-mail.html
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