On Mon, Aug 23, 2004 at 09:48:59AM +0200, Sven Luther wrote: > > > This is also a more general issue: how do we deal with licenses that we > > > can't read, in the general case? We assume that Debian users can read > > > English well enough to understand license grants, but we can't assume > > > they understand French or other languages, too, and neither d-legal > > > nor the ftpmasters can review such licenses properly--not just for > > > freeness, but for legal distribution. Even if we have one or two > > > people who can read a given language fluently, the license still won't > > > receive anything approaching the level of scrutiny it would receive > > > with the whole list able to read it.
> > Agreed; I think at a minimum we need either a legally-binding license in > > English, or an English translation vouched for by someone debian-legal > > subscribers are willing to trust, to be able to make any determination > > that a license is DFSG-free. > I disagree on that. We just need a subset of debian-legal speaking that > language, and if anyone else disagrees, well, they are free to learn the > language in question, like we were all forced to learn english to participate > in this :) Except that we also need an ftpmaster to be able to follow the discussions and make a final determination. As much as I am in favor of Debian being accessible to people who don't speak English, it's important that we have *some* lingua franca for core matters, and English is this lingua franca. -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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