Package: www.debian.org Severity: important
This is very common question that comes to my mind time after time: "Is this license called X free according to Debian Free Software Guidelines" Every fscking time I try find answer to such question from WWW-pages of Debian-project, I find it to be outrageously difficult and time-consuming task: * * * There is this page: http://www.debian.org/legal/licenses/ Just compare your lousy license-list page to this: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html License list page of Debian project has these drawbacks (especially when compared to gnu.org's corresponding page): 1) You can not navigate to that page easily from front page of Debian-project; I just somehow stumbled across to that page some day. Why on earth these pages do not have links pointing to it?: http://www.debian.org/social_contract http://www.debian.org/intro/free http://www.debian.org/sitemap 2) It has very few licenses. 3) It is updated way too slowly. 4) It do not provide references to relevant WWW-pages, documents, papers, decisions, mailing-list messages etc., where freeness of certain license is further evaluated. 5) It do not have summaries about freeness of licenses. 6) It do not point out exact versions of licenses that are free or non-free. Those were those drawbacks of that page. Right now that lousy WWW-page do not give exact answers to these questions: Is GNU GPLv3 DFSG-free? Which Creative Commons -licenses are DFSG-free and which are not? Which versions of those Creative Commons -licenses are free and which are not? Is GNU FDL DFSG-free? Somehow I have stumbled across this WWW-page: http://people.debian.org/~evan/ccsummary.html But it is about CC-licenses of version 2.0, not 3.0. Then there is this: http://people.debian.org/~evan/draftresponse.txt It is about _draft_ of CC-licenses version 3.0, not about _final_ licenses. * * * AFAIK ftp-master(s) should not let non-DFSG-free packages to slip to main-directory of Debian. But I do not consider this reliable way to find out freeness of some license: This way has these drawbacks: 1) Sometimes aptitude, vrms and other tools show some package in main, when in reality it is not DFSG-free package at all; It happens all the time with packages that come from some unofficial apt-get-source. Packages of debian-multimedia.org are very good example of such packages. 2) First I must find some Debian-package that has exactly the same license whose DFSG-freeness I am trying to figure out and then check out if it has gone to main or non-free. But it is almost impossible: packages.debian.org do not provide searching packages having certain license. Sometimes Debian do not have any package having same license whose DFSG-freenes I am trying to figure out. 3) Sometimes some non-free stuff may slip to main. Those were those drawbacks. I am not very sure about that last one. Right now Debian has a new package called ttf-konatu and it is in main. It uses Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Does that mean CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 is really DFSG-free? What if ftp-master made a mistake? * * * Then there is that mailing-list called debian-legal. You can rest assured I am not the only one having better things to do than searching mailing-list archives of debian-legal. If aforementioned license list page were better maintained, there would be no need to waste time searching archives of debian-legal . * * * I am very often interested in stance of Debian project in license questions, because those people evaluate licenses very carefully. Sometimes they find problems that are not found by FSF; GNU FDL is good example about such license. But when decisions about DFSG-freeness of license are done, they are not very well reported to outside of Debian-project.: GNU FDL had its problems from day one, when FSF released it. But it took way too much time before Debian-project made enough noise about those problems: First there was discussions in debian-legal of course. Then something appeared to Debian Weekly News. Then came this announcement: http://www.debian.org/News/2006/20060316 But aforementioned license list still says nothing about it. During that slow process people created documents under GNU FDL, because they did not know about problems of GNU FDL. Now same thing is happening with CC-licenses: There has been big hype about those licenses but Debian project has been too quiet about problems of those licenses. Meanwhile people have created non-free content, because they think CC-licenses are |<00|_ and nobody have told them there are non-free licenses in CC-licenses. -- System Information: Debian Release: 4.0 APT prefers testing APT policy: (1100, 'testing'), (990, 'stable'), (500, 'testing-proposed-updates'), (500, 'proposed-updates'), (101, 'testing'), (99, 'unstable') Architecture: i386 (i686) Kernel: Linux 2.6.22-1-k7 (SMP w/1 CPU core) Locale: LANG=fi_FI.utf8, LC_CTYPE=fi_FI.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash -- Juhapekka "naula" Tolvanen * http colon slash slash iki dot fi slash juhtolv "Sou sa, ima mo ore wa mitsukerarenai sonzai no imi ga, dakara motto motto motto motto motto kono karada ni imi wo kizamitsukeru: 'Tada waratte, fuminijireba ii.'" Dir en grey -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
