Re: Stallman and Non-free Content

[Amit Aronovitch]

Ira Abramov wrote: Quoting Shlomi Fish, from the post of Tue, 15 Feb: So how does that co-exists with the Debian new policy of not allowing any type of non-free content into the core distribution? Why should graphics, music, fonts, text documents, etc. be treated in the same way as software is? Why is Debian trying to be sainter than the Pope? I think you are mixing two seperate kinds of "saintness" here. It's much like the old lawyers' saying, "the law is not about justice". RMS is only saying that non-free game-art might be "moral", not that it would be legally safe for paranoid software distributors to include it in their distros.  While RMS is considered by many the "pope" for the moral/ideological aspects of free software (also a Saint of the church of Emacs ), Debian is considered more "legally paranoid".  This might be expected from a fully volunteer-based organization, that does not want to hire lawyers (and judging by recent events - if anything can get sued, it will... :-) ).  BTW, non-free & contrib stuff is supported, easily installable and available on any Debian mirror - it's just not put into the 'main' category, so that if you want to open a Debian-CD factory you can just burn the main archive and not have to worry about getting sued. no news there. consider that the GFDL does not stand the test of the DFSG and people were devided about including the manuals and info pages of free software projects like Emacs in Debian. games are a small problem here, and indeed Debian are the most extremist crowd, and they have proven repeatedly for the last 3 years that they are indeed, crazier than the pope. In fact this is an example for exactly the opposite. If you look closely at the *reasons* why they reject GFDL ( the Position Statement ), you'll see that they are actually rejecting it for being "too extremist" - to the point where it becomes too restrictive for distributors. e.g. - you can't allow users to download "binary" (opaque) form of a GFDL doc, even if you do provide the "source" (transparent) form on the same site.  On the "ideological" scale, Debian's DFSG is almost exactly the same words as OSI's OSD , which is considered "less fanatic" than GNU (OSD accepts BSD style licenses - which basicly allow anything, while the GPL takes a more active position by requiring that all derivative products are also free).