On Tue, 05 Oct 2021 18:29:07 +0200 Ricardo wrote: > If the terms of 7.80 were non-free then nmap should have been > removed rather than freezing it at 7.80.
i agree - people are suggesting that; and i suspect that is the reason why the FSF has not responded in all this time - in any case, the FSF has asked distros to hold it back until further notice, and no further notice has yet to come ive read both licenses and they both appear to be lacking some of the four freedoms, very explicitly - the key to this issue is: "who decides what is libre or not?" - IMHO, such decisions reduce to nothing more or less than: "does it offer all four freedoms?" - i prefer the latter; because it has an objective answer, and the criteria come directly from the FSF the FSDG work-group does not need to make such decisions, and neither do distros - the evidence and liberation procedures are usually so clear, that they never get discussed outside of each distro - for the most part, it is simply amortizing the work-load of discovering the relevant objective facts about, and liberation procedures for, some contentious programs; then presenting them to the FSF for final decisions, if necessary rather than each distro repeating the same auditing work and deciding for itself what "libre" means; it would be more efficient if a collaborative team audited contentious software for all distros, and presented the results to the FSF for the final decision, binding upon all distros - IMHO, it would be more respectable as well; because it demonstrates a base-line consensus among the FSDG distros, regarding the minimal liberation procedures thats not to mention, that these are among the grunt-work for any distro - its not the fun or sexy stuff that any dev perfers to spend time on - people should be eager to pool their efforts on these boring administrative chores in contrast, jean is arguing that it is better for each distro to decide for itself, which programs are libre (or that some distros may be "more than 100% libre") - that is purely anarchic though, which makes the FSDG meaningless (as it would for any conventions, guidelines, or standards) - and it results in each distro doing redundant work i believe that most FSDG issues are purely objective questions with clear answers and solutions, requiring no re-interpretation of the FSDG; so any conflicting interpretation would be easily proven erroneous eg: which licenses? which files do each license apply to? are these two licenses compatible? in most cases, there should be no disagreement about such obvious properties