Debian might begin officially permitting inclusion of works you can't entirely modify in its "free" tree.
So maybe there needs to be an art project that takes a Debian distro with everything in "free" installed and makes random changes to the data. Random changes all throughout the packages. And then republish the new versions, and run and display the results in public installations. Sure results may not be pretty it may take lots of iterations and lots of poring thru the output to see if any of the generative changes are interesting or useful, if you want to look for that. So it most certainly would look ugly, rough around the edges yes and probably things would crash. Yes but if it is the job of the artist to find the answers then maybe this poking into Debian is necessary right now -- there's been ongoing debate on debian-legal over the past month or so (beginning somewhere around <http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2001/debian-legal-200111/msg00006.html> and ending somewhere around <http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2001/debian-legal-200112/msg00358.html>) over the licensing of documentation and whether or not it must or does conform to the Debian Free Software Guidelines. Those guidelines were written for text that is "software" and not text used or intended to be used in other ways, and as a result Debian is having growing pains, I think; DFSG will have to become free _information_ guidelines instead, sooner or later, if the Debian distribution itself begins to include more than software. Because the distro is already expanding to include books, sounds, icons, images, data, etc. Some, but not all, of this artwork and other data already in Debian is categorically non-free. And what's now raising this issue is that, unlike the copyleft of free software, some of the documentation-specific licenses permit unmodifiable text -- the idea now is to permit in Debian _some_ unmodifiable text in the documentation. A percentage or specified size limit of unmodifiable text are some propositions. (Note that if you applied this to your software program source code text so that some of it was unmodifiable, it would not pass the test for DFSG compliancy.) So if this begins to happen and "some" unmodifiable text is considered okay in the works that Debian packages (not in the licensing or copyrights or titles, but _in the works themselves_), then the "free" Debian will become partially non-free -- proprietary. It would be a loss if Debian, the examplar of applied free-information principles built by individuals working together, begins to close up in this way. So maybe now is the time to start poking holes in this data.
