Hi, Branden!
On Sunday, 2. December 2001 10:11, Branden Robinson wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 02, 2001 at 10:19:55AM +0100, Thomas Uwe
Gruettmueller wrote:
> > As I understand it, a package that makes it into [main]
> > complies to all points of the DFSG. However, your proposal
> > will allow packages that don't fully comply the DFSG to
> > enter [main], if the violation is not too grave. I consider
> > this inconsistent.
>
> Well, depends on what you mean by "comply". Under what I
> understand to be your interpretation of "comply", everything
> licensed under the GPL or LGPL would have to be removed from
> main because the text of these licensed is copyrighted and
> licensed under terms that forbid modification.
Generally, you are right. So some sort of clarification will be
necessary.
However, I don't think your proposal is sufficient: For example,
a manual that contains an invariant (and thus unremovable)
section stating: "Drink alcohol!" or "Satan wants you!", this
will pass your rules, because it is less than 32KB, and propably
less than 5% of the whole text. However, this remark might
render the manual unusable in a primary school, because the
house rules, or maybe some law, might forbid such remarks in
front of children.
I understand that the text of the license document cannot be
changed, because that is the way a license works.
I also understand that free works are accomplished with meta
information, that tell something about the legal status of the
work, e.g. authors, version history, maybe also a table that
indicates which line was written by whom, or a remark like
"Author X disclaims to be responsible for the content of derived
versions"... These things help users to trace back the legal
status of the work, if in doubt. Besides that, they are clearly
seperated from the work itself.
What I do not understand is why free works should be accompanied
with any non-free stuff other than the above, and still be
considered free.
> > So, as there are cases that fail the DFSG, but which are
> > also too valuable to be put into [non-free], why should they
> > not get a seperate, new category?
>
> I don't think this follows, for the reasons described above.
If I have understood it right, you believe that the Emacs manual
is non-free, while others do not want it to be categorized like
that, and thus be put on the same level as stuff in [non-free]
that fails any rule of the DFSG, and comes with a special
permission for Debian.
The idea I have in mind about the [non-free light] category is
that non-free-CDs that contain only packages that only fail DFSG
2, 3 or 6 can still be copied verbatim. So the CD as one big
data chunk cannot become uncopyable.
Bye,
Thomas
}:o{#
