[Charles Plessy] > On the other hand, does the effort of removing these documents from > the upstream sources has any chance to make things change in the > future, by either having the IETF freeing the RFCs, or volunteers > paraphrasing free versions of them?
The fact that Debian cares about licensing issues, and doesn't just ship random things with random licenses on the theory that the users won't notice or won't care, very much sets us apart. It is a real value-add to many people. A lot of users appreciate our promise to read all the licenses so they don't have to. The moment we decide that, gosh, we may as well save ourselves some trouble and ship a few files that aren't actually free to modify and redistribute, users will no longer be able to trust us to do that, and they'll be back to reading long and boring license texts for themselves, just to determine what they can and can't do. Also, refusing to ship these "harmless" things raises the visibility of the issues. I often get into arguments where a potential user somewhere says "WTF, Debian doesn't even ship RFCs [or Sun Java, or Schilling's cdrecord], what stupid and pointless ideology". When I start to explain which freedoms we promise to our users that these things do not offer, one of two things happens. Often the user will say "I don't care about those freedoms anyway", or words to that effect. But sometimes ... sometimes the user will say "Whoa, really? You mean I can't write my own document, cutting and pasting from an RFC, and distribute it outside the IETF process?" and as I explain further, suddenly we have a user who notices, for the first time, that the RFC (or Sun Java, or whatever) actually _does_ restrict their rights in a way they might actually care about. This happens often enough that I'm convinced that a lot of users would care a lot about DFSG freedom if only they were aware of the issues. Debian's policy has the side effect of bringing visibility to the issues, to educate these users, and I think it is a good thing. Even if it isn't the primary purpose of the DFSG. -- Peter Samuelson | org-tld!p12n!peter | http://p12n.org/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]