Bug#207932: Statement that all of Debian needs to be Free?
Michael K. Edwards [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Personally, I would retain them as a courtesy to upstream; users are no more and no less free to modify or remove them than Debian is. The alternative -- to demand that all content other than license texts and other legal indicia must be arbitrarily modifiable in order to be DFSG-free -- is logically consistent but would require the removal of all remotely artistic or polemical works in the Debian archive. And for what it's worth, my eariler post on this topic still reflects my position fairly well. -- Rob Browning rlb @defaultvalue.org and @debian.org; previously @cs.utexas.edu GPG starting 2002-11-03 = 14DD 432F AE39 534D B592 F9A0 25C8 D377 8C7E 73A4 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Bug#207932: Statement that all of Debian needs to be Free?
On Fri, Jun 17, 2005 at 06:04:20PM +0200, Dylan Thurston wrote:
I'm surprised that someone thinks that there's any controversy on this
point. As I understand it, the current situation is that, with the
release of sarge, everything in Debian should be DFSG free, including
programs, documentation, and miscellaneous files (as in this case), as
well as everything else, with the sole exception of license files. Is
my summary correct? The maintainer apparently wants a concensus from
debian-legal on this (in a separate message to the bug).
You're correct.
FYI, determining which materials are covered by the DFSG isn't a matter
decided by debian-legal (though I don't object to discussing it here),
but by the Social Contract.
Subject: Bug#207932: Bug #207932 - emacs21: Includes non-free documents
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: debian-legal@lists.debian.org
Followup for :
http://bugs.debian.org/207932
Thanks you for helping debian tracks licencing issues. Though this
bug looks like an extension of the GFDL issue to some non
documentation texts. This have not been agreed upon by
debian-legal (in fact as far as i know licences and such
documents have been explicitely exclude from the need to be DSFG
free ).
As Dylan mentioned above, the only files which are excluded from the
requirement to be Free are (by necessity) license texts. Of the
documents listed in the original bug:
etc/{CENSORSHIP,copying.paper,INTERVIEW,LINUX-GNU,THE-GNU-PROJECT,WHY-FREE}
only copying.paper sounds like a license; the rest are simply documents,
which must be DFSG-free to be in Debian. This is not a matter of
controversy, or even significant disagreement; SC2004-003 made this
explicitly clear. Please remove these non-free documents; the grace
period allowed by SC2004-004 expired with the release of sarge.
--
Glenn Maynard
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Bug#207932: Statement that all of Debian needs to be Free?
On 6/17/05, Jrme Marant [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Glenn Maynard [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
etc/{CENSORSHIP,copying.paper,INTERVIEW,LINUX-GNU,THE-GNU-PROJECT,WHY-FREE}
only copying.paper sounds like a license; the rest are simply documents,
which must be DFSG-free to be in Debian. This is not a matter of
controversy, or even significant disagreement; SC2004-003 made this
explicitly clear. Please remove these non-free documents; the grace
period allowed by SC2004-004 expired with the release of sarge.
They are out of the scope of the DFSG. They are neither programs nor
documentation: they are speeches and articles which are logically
non modifiable without the consent of their author.
Whether they are around or not is irrelevant to the freeness of Emacs.
IMHO, Jrme is right but for the wrong reasons. In many
jurisdictions (especially France, but other parts of US law besides
copyright have similar consequences), copyright license does not and
cannot grant authority to misattribute or violate the integrity of an
artistic or polemical work. These documents are not part of the work
of authorship that is the Emacs program and documentation. They may
be retained or removed; but they may not be arbitrarily modified.
Personally, I would retain them as a courtesy to upstream; users are
no more and no less free to modify or remove them than Debian is. The
alternative -- to demand that all content other than license texts and
other legal indicia must be arbitrarily modifiable in order to be
DFSG-free -- is logically consistent but would require the removal of
all remotely artistic or polemical works in the Debian archive.
The GFDL is another story, because under some circumstances it
purports to condition the permission to modify and redistribute the
substance of the document on the retention of unrelated material.
Personally, my reasons for objecting to the GFDL are different; but I
just want to make the point that a putative debian-legal (or even
Debian-wide) consensus on the DFSG-freeness of the GFDL has no bearing
on whether it is OK to retain LINUX-GNU et al.
Cheers,
- Michael
(IANAL, IANADD)
