[lots of interesting stuff snipped that is discussed sufficiently as far as I am concerned, thank you for it]
On Fri, Feb 01, 2002 at 03:22:18PM +0100, Sunnanvind Fenderson wrote: > Though the four freedoms of the FSF is a political statement. "These > are rights everyone should have when it comes to functional software" > - they're easily understandable and they're useful for advocacy and > explaining free software. Well, Debian is a political mvovement, and I don't think there is much disagreement about those particular freedoms. > Debian "needs" more detailed guidelines (that's why I was somewhat > involved the recent attempts to clarify the DFSG wrt invariant > sections) in order to make consistent, understandable judgement about > what goes into non-free and what goes into main. I figure that the FSF > have some long, opaque guidelines hidden in their vaults somewhere > that their lawyer(s) use to decide what goes on the free-list and what > doesn't. Actually, I don't believe it (although I am not sure, as I have no special insight into such matters). The guidelines are pretty clear, basically, and RMS had an amazing consistent stance upon these issues since a couple of years. In corner cases, the matter is discussed and it seems to me RMS makes a final decision. I have seldom heard of cases where he changed his opinion after he made a final decision ;) (although it has happened, see vim). I think the four freedoms come closest to a definition of free software as you can get. Issues like patents and other funky stuff are in the process of being worked out (some of this work will go into the GPLv3, IIRC). There is not a pack of lawyers behind the FSF which work it all out. Although there are lawyers (like Eben Moglen), I think they are in close contact with RMS. You can say what you want about the FSF and RMS, but they do an amazing job in defending free software, and holding the standard to a high measure. Debian had its own successes in getting licenses from upstream authors clarified or even changed, and we can be proud of it. The FSF has achieved such successes as well, but it is not widely recognized because it is usually kept under the blanket. If you are more interested in this, you can check out the articles of Eben Moglen about Defending the GPL on his web site (first hit in Google search for "Eben Moglen"). Thanks, Marcus -- `Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] Marcus Brinkmann GNU http://www.gnu.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de
