Josh Triplett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >"The opinions of debian-legal" consist of the opinions of all those >developers and non-developers who participate on this list. This is not >a closed list. If the opinions of some developers diverge from the >opinions on debian-legal, then those developers should start >participating on debian-legal and expressing their opinions.
Yes, in an ideal world that would be the case. In the world we live in, people have been intimidated away from participating in debian-legal because of the debating style and perceived extremism of certain participants. Refusal to acknowledge that is likely to end up leading to debian-legal having no influence whatsoever. >I believe the situation in the Dissident test is that the laws of the >totalitarian government are irrelevant. The Dissident test triggers if, >when the dissident finally leaves the jurisdiction of the totalitarian >government, some copyright holder can say that the actions they took to >maintain their privacy violated the copyright license, by the laws of >non-totalitarian governments. Ok. Why do we consider this worse than the GPL's requirement that source be distributed with binaries? A pragmatic disident isn't going to hand out source to people that he wants to run the software - there's more of a risk of it being traced back to him. A written offer isn't much better if it has his name on it. The GPL makes it harder to be a political dissident than the BSD license does. Why have we drawn the line there rather than in a place that would also exclude the GPL? (I'm going to be fantastically unconvinced by "We drew it there because we can't allow the GPL to become non-free") -- Matthew Garrett | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
