On Wed, 2004-08-25 at 15:25 -0400, Brian Thomas Sniffen wrote: > Sure we can. I might convince you that they're in the wrong place -- > and certainly debian-legal is the right place for that discussion. Or > you might convince me that they are in the right place. Neither of > those is an axiomatic belief.
No, I don't think debian-legal /is/ the right place. Debian-legal is the place to discuss whether a license is free or not based on Debian's ideas of freeness, not whether Debian's ideas of freeness are correct. There may not be a more appropriate place at present. That doesn't make the use of debian-legal appropriate. > Well, no more than writing something big directly in machine code -- > and I'm not really clear what the projects' opinion is on write-only > code. I think a kernel written in direct machine code, or a similar > program in Brainfuck, has no source code. There is no reasonable form > for modification, so it's not Free Software. But it's never been > necessary to form a collective opinion on that, so I haven't seen many > arguments either way. I'm not sure I'd agree with that, but this probably isn't the time for the discussion. > But holding up a probably-non-free thing and proclaiming that it's > more non-free than a patch clause doesn't do much to convince me that > patch clauses are free. Yes, source-less programs are worse. But > that doesn't make practically unmodifiable programs free. You believe that there are some languages that are inherently non-free? I'm still waiting to hear an example of something that patch clauses actually make impossible. -- Matthew Garrett | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
