Hi, Il 13/12/18 00:29, Giacomo Tesio ha scritto: > There are several reasons why I'm "trying to go it alone". > Some have been outlined in the response to Simon McVittie. > > At the end of the day, being alone has several big advantages: > - I'm free > - I've nothing to loose > - I cannot do much harm if I fail > - I can do a lot of good if I succeed > > But on the specific matter of the Hacking License, I obviously welcome > help and suggestions.
There is a sentence that common Internet wisdom considers an "African proverb"[1]: "If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together". [1] Which is, of course, ridiculous: even if it is true, and it might very well be, this attribution cannot hide its western-centrism, in assuming that Africa is a single and culturally homogeneous place. I personally believe this can explain the kind of resistance you are finding on this matter from Debian people: I am not sure that it would be true to say that Debian people like to go together, but in a sense we need to do so, because there is no other way to manage a gigantic thing like Debian, even less so when you have (as we have) to keep contact with the wider free software/open source ecosystem. There are many different people, with different opinions and motivations, so compromise is something that you have to accept. While I would say that most people in Debian are there because of some "idealistic" reason, practicality matters, and it matters a lot. I doubt many people in Debian enjoy dealing with licenses and legal affairs, but there is no way around: if you want to build a free software distribution in the world we currently are in, legal stuff matters, and as in any other field some kind of compromise is required there too. Debian Developers know far too well the kind of problems that you have to take into account when dealing with obscure licenses: most of them like to spend their time on making things work, not making lawyers happy, but as I said above legal stuff is something that you have to take into account when building a distribution, because you want to be sure that users (and developers) are protected and you want to know that what you are building reflects your values of contributing something that is free for everybody. Software distributed under well known licenses is fantastic from this point of view: you already know what that means, you already know that you are protected, you already know how you can combine things (or can find out easily). Having to evaluate a custom license quite an important discouraging factor when packaging some software. I believe that others share this view. That is why we insist so much on this point with you. Then, if you want to go alone and driven by idealistic views alone, you are of course free to. But keep in mind that this will make it more difficult for you to interact with communities that value (or try, or need to value) team playing and have to deal with practical concerns, like legal stuff and not having an infinite amount of human resources to spend on each single problem. > I suppose that lack of further objections about the Debian > compatibility of the Hacking License doesn't mean that I convinced > most of debian-legal contributors, but that on the contrary they agree > with you and that no software under the Hacking License should go in > Debian, whatever is actually written in the license itself. Not exactly. I'd say that most of debian-legal contributors (me included) think that it is not clear if software under the Hacking License can go in Debian: license assessment is often not a clear-cut binary process, compromises can happen (and have happened in the past), grey areas often remain. At some point someone has to take a decision, and that decision depends also on criteria others than the license (it is much easier to compromise for a software like Firefox, that most recognize as very useful, then for a random library for interacting with applications written for an operating system nobody uses). Now, the point is if you want to ease this process or not. If you don't, which is absolutely ok for everybody, then it will remain hard. Certainly not impossible, since, as I said, there are many intervening factors. > That's why I asked "If the problem is not in the text of the license, > how can I fix it?" because, at times, some exchanges seem > (legitimate!) political opinions about the opportunity of a license > instead of problems with this specific license. > That's why I supposed that we lack a forth test that could clearly > exclude the Hacking License. > Some how, I think this unstated insight of Debian Developers should be > verbalized. There is an easy way to fix your license, and we have been suggesting it all along: $ cp /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-3 HACK.txt Or, in other words, the test is "Is this license a new one, written by one random guy without legal counsel and without any community consensus?". And it is written in the FAQs you linked, question number 5. It does not clearly exclude the Hacking license, since the Hacking license is probably not far from being an acceptable license (I personally think the different treatment for "organizations" makes it non free, and there are some points that might contradict the law, thus possibly making it invalid; but this is just my opinion, and it is pretty irrelevant since it is not me the one who will have to judge). However it gives you a criterion for understanding why most DDs will shy away from software distributed under it. All the best, Giovanni. -- Giovanni Mascellani <g.mascell...@gmail.com> Postdoc researcher - Université Libre de Bruxelles
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