Disclaimer: I'm not a debian-developer, and consequently I have no official standing in the Debian community. But I have been participating on debian-legal for some time (at least since the beginning of the GFDL discussion here a few years back), and am at least somewhat familiar with the issues we're discussing. I have no doubt that I'll be vigorously corrected if I err. ;)
Richard Stallman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Those words are simply an indirect way of declining to recognize the > difference between loss of freedom and practical inconvenience. That's not entirely true; I believe that debian-legal generally makes this distinction based on the severity of the inconvenience (i.e., we make allowances for "insignificant" inconveniences). I think this is the point that Joe Wreschnig was trying to make. Generally, though, an inconvenience must be quite insignificant indeed in order to warrant this free pass. This is an essential point -- possibly even the source of our disagreement on this issue. I believe (and I suspect that much of debian-legal agrees with me) that there is no good way to distinguish between a barrier that is an inconvenience and a barrier that is a loss of freedom. Any attempt to do so will inevitably be context-dependant. One of the core principles of the Free Software community, IMHO, is that the end user is king; the person with a problem to solve should not have his or her options curtailed any more than absolutely necessary by the distributor or the copyright holder. Thus a useful heuristic (and I realize it is nothing more) is to be very, very suspect of context-dependant judgements enforced in licenses. I say the above simply to point out that, in my opinion, any effort to distinguish between freedom and practical inconvenience must meet a very high burden of proof. > Where we draw the line, when judging licenses as free or not, is > whether you can practically speaking make the code or the manual do > the substantive job you want. If license restrictions make it > impossible to make the technical changes you want, then the license > is non-free. If they make it possible, but with conditions you > might not necessarily like, it is free but with a practical > inconvenience. The nature of a "substantive" and/or "technical" change is what attracts my attention here. Though, to my knowledge, you have not attempted to describe what those two words mean in this context, I very much doubt that it is possible to do so in a way that is both universal (i.e., applying in all possible contexts) and objective. Yet I believe that this must be done in order for this distinction to be useful. If you are willing, I'd very much appreciate it if you could try to expand on your position here. >> So what divides "egregious practical inconveniences" and >> "non-free"? > > The practical inconveniences of the GFDL are similar to those Debian > accepts from other licenses that we agree are free. They are not > egregious. Occasionally debian-legal does make mistakes. Could you point out some examples of licenses that you feel have similar inconveniences to those of the GFDL? In addition to pointing out possible errors on our part it might help to provide a more concrete grounding for our discussion. -- Jeremy Hankins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> PGP fingerprint: 748F 4D16 538E 75D6 8333 9E10 D212 B5ED 37D0 0A03
