This summary won't be as professional looking as Manoj's are, but I want to condense a few points:
1) Free standards are desirable We seem to more or less all agree on this. 2) Non-free, but still distributable standards, should be distributed The value to debian of including the standards it follows is high. It outweighs their non-freeness. This is in some sense analogous to the PGP situation. The value of PGP outweighs its non-freeness, but we will switch to GPG soon. Similarly, if and when free standards emerge which replace our non-free ones, we will switch. 3) Free licenses are desirable Although there are some protections in law, in some countries (possibly all) which allow derived licenses in some way, there seems to be no reason not to make this explicit. Therefore, we should encourage free licenses. Perhaps we should try to persuade RMS that GPL3 should be free. 4) We *must* distribute licenses with our software So non-free licenses are going to be in main, to the extent that they accompany software. So, I see a clear similarity between the two situations. And I suggest that standards which are non-free do not go into main, but go somewhere else, yet to be determined. We must now, IMO, consider the issue of 'free content', and whether or not debian distributes what I shall call 'works of art', and if so, in which section. Regards, Jules /----------------+-------------------------------+---------------------\ | Jelibean aka | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | 6 Evelyn Rd | | Jules aka | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | Richmond, Surrey | | Julian Bean | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | TW9 2TF *UK* | +----------------+-------------------------------+---------------------+ | War doesn't demonstrate who's right... just who's left. | | When privacy is outlawed... only the outlaws have privacy. | \----------------------------------------------------------------------/
