On Sat, Jul 05, 2003 at 02:10:12PM +0200, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote: > [Stephen Stafford] > > We have a commitment that everything in Debian main is Free. Since > > the RFC license is NOT Free, it can't be in main. This does NOT > > imply anything about the usefulness of RFCs, merely about their > > Freedom. > > There seem to be two ways of interpreting the social contract. One is > that the only thing (100%) included in Debian must be free software. > The other one is that all software included in Debian must be free > software, as defined by the DFSG. Only if you use the first > interpretation do you statement make sense. I find it rather strange > to try to handle everything as software, and believe we need to handle > non-software with a different set of guidelines. Until these > guidelines are in place, I believe it is unwise to try to handle > non-software as software and force the DFSG on all of these.
Even a minimal level of understanding of what free software is, and what Debian is about, is sufficient to understand that the RFC license is clearly non-free. The DFSG _is_ just a set of guidelines; playing lawyer games with the wording will not make non-modifiable things acceptable. Any arguments you may care to make in favour of non-modifiable things will apply equally to software. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | Dept. of Computing, `. `' | Imperial College, `- -><- | London, UK
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