Re: trademark policy draft - redux
Le Sun, Jan 06, 2013 at 06:26:26PM +0100, Stefano Zacchiroli a écrit : 5) demote the obligation that, when using the trademarks for commercial purposes, one should advertise how much of the price will be donated to the Debian Project. It is now a recommendation only Thanks a lot, Stefano, for this change. I think that it will strenghen our position when asking to relax license clauses restricting commercial use for some software we distribute or would like to distibute. I have one final comment, not related to the above. For understandable reasons, the proposed trademark policy is quite insisting on not misrepresenting Debian. But how about parody and satire ? Do we rely on fair use regulations in each countries to allow them despite our trademark policy ? Have a nice day, -- Charles Plessy Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130107123920.ga1...@falafel.plessy.net
Re: trademark policy draft - redux
On Mon, Jan 07, 2013 at 09:39:20PM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote: Thanks a lot, Stefano, for this change. I think that it will strenghen our position when asking to relax license clauses restricting commercial use for some software we distribute or would like to distibute. Thanks for your feedback, Charles. I have one final comment, not related to the above. For understandable reasons, the proposed trademark policy is quite insisting on not misrepresenting Debian. But how about parody and satire ? Do we rely on fair use regulations in each countries to allow them despite our trademark policy ? IIRC it is something we have discussed in the previous occurrence of this thread. But in the avoidance of doubt: the policy, and trademarks in general, do not care much about misrepresenting Debian as in parody and satire. Rather, they care about avoiding customer confusion. So it is perfectly fine to mock Debian; what is not fine is pretending you're shipping Debian to users while you're shipping, say, Windows with malware or a different distribution (in the latter case you can of course redistribute by simply stating based on Debian, as many custom Debian modifications out there already do). Hope this clarifies, Cheers. -- Stefano Zacchiroli . . . . . . . z...@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o Debian Project Leader . . . . . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o . « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club » signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Validity of DFSG #10
Stefano Zacchiroli lea...@debian.org wrote: Hold on :-) All you're discussing here already exists. FTP masters vet software that enters the archive, de facto deciding whether the associated licenses are DFSG free or not. Actually, don't they decide whether the *software* follows the DFSG? They're not the DFLG, after all. It is quite possible to use a licence that works fine for some other software and botch it (I think there's a famous example where a trademark licence is applied in tandem with the copyright one), resulting in a fail. That's why I phrased http://www.debian.org/legal/licenses/ as Licenses currently found... rather than the inaccurate wording used on many entries on http://wiki.debian.org/DFSGLicenses It's also why lists of good licenses have limited value. I didn't want to imply that we should change anything of that. We should rather consolidate the work they do and index licenses, decisions, and rationales for such decisions in a central place that people can look at. I think there have been at least three attempts to index them in the past, but few seemed to care about them and so they gradually bitrot. Even the DFSGLicenses wiki page was last edited 2012-08-16 and now appears to be immutable. Who wants this index? Who's willing to put the time in? I'd be happy to help, although I won't lead another attempt. Regards, -- MJ Ray (slef), member of www.software.coop, a for-more-than-profit co-op. http://koha-community.org supporter, web and library systems developer. In My Opinion Only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html Available for hire (including development) at http://www.software.coop/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/e1tscoo-0001tk...@petrol.towers.org.uk
Re: Validity of DFSG #10
Stefano Zacchiroli writes (Re: Validity of DFSG #10): This has been discussed in various occasions. A recent one within the project is the question time of my talk at DebConf12 [1], thanks to input by Steve Langasek. But our flaws on this matter are being discussed also outside the project border; see for instance the interesting talk The Tragedy of the Commons Gatekeepers by Richard Fontana at LinuxCon North America last year [2,3]. [1]: http://penta.debconf.org/dc12_schedule/events/881.en.html [2]: http://faif.us/cast/2012/oct/10/0x33/ [3]: http://linuxcon2012-fontana.rhcloud.com/ I found a report of Richard Fontana's talk here: http://lwn.net/Articles/516896/ Richard (or perhaps Michael Kerrisk[1]) does us a disservice there. I agree with Richard that, modulo some notable exception like FTP masters' ruling about the Ubuntu Font License [4], we are not doing a good job at documenting and explaining our choices. The best approximations we have are either non-authoritative, or not maintained, or both. The net result is that by searching the web license names and Debian one will likely end up on debian-legal discussions, that are not the official project stance on license free-ness. This is unfortunate. But it's not true to say that the FTP masters have the final say. The Developers have the final say by General Resolution and have exercised that power on multiple occasions including most of the most controversial licensing decisions. That's an open, transparent democratic and community-based process which OSI and the FSF would IMO do much better to emulate. Debian is the only widely-referenced licence Free Software review body whose ultimate decisionmakers are anything other than a self-perpetuating oligarchy. And I disagree with another of Richard Fontana's worries. He thinks that having licence review bodies which people defer to is a bad thing. Back in the real world, no-one has enough time and energy to make every decision themselves. Instead in our lives - in decisions big and small, in our economic social and political choices - we all follow the decisions of people and institutions we respect. This is a normal and essential part of human existence. It doesn't take away our freedom to judge and review our effective delegation to others. In Debian we are lucky in having the size, the focus and the standing to be able to make these decisions collectively for ourselves. We should be proud that there are others who choose to respect our decisions. And that doesn't detract from our individual ability to disagree about the details of those collectively decision. Ian. [1] I'm going to take Michael's report of the talk as accurate. In this kind of discourse, I think if people want us to not to misrepresent their views they need to write them down and publish them. And no, a slide deck doesn't count and nor does a recording of a talk. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20714.55515.243939.899...@chiark.greenend.org.uk
Re: Validity of DFSG #10
Le Mon, Jan 07, 2013 at 01:32:20PM +, MJ Ray a écrit : Stefano Zacchiroli lea...@debian.org wrote: I didn't want to imply that we should change anything of that. We should rather consolidate the work they do and index licenses, decisions, and rationales for such decisions in a central place that people can look at. I think there have been at least three attempts to index them in the past, but few seemed to care about them and so they gradually bitrot. Even the DFSGLicenses wiki page was last edited 2012-08-16 and now appears to be immutable. Who wants this index? Who's willing to put the time in? I'd be happy to help, although I won't lead another attempt. Hello everybody, I would be interested to contribute, but on the other hand, I do not thing that it is possible to do serious work if the decision makers, the FTP team, do not have enough time to explain precisely their decisions. For instance, I am not able to understand by myself what in Creative Commons 2.5 changed to make it acceptable for Debian, and I have not found this information in public documents. In the absence of (and even in parallel with) a curated list of Free and non-Free licenses, I think that general statistics of what license are seen in the main and non-free components of our archive would have value, without requiring commitment from the FTP team. There are now 1,387 Debian copyright files declaring a 1.0 machine-readable format in the collab-qa/packages-metadata repository on svn.debian.org (see http://wiki.debian.org/UpstreamMetadata for details). This repository is not perfect, but I think it can be a good start for people who do not have access to lintian.debian.org. Any volunteers ? Have a nice day, -- Charles Plessy Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130107223519.gb3...@falafel.plessy.net
Re: Validity of DFSG #10
On 13083 March 1977, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote: Unfortunately, we are not doing a particularly good job at documenting our choices --- in particular: which licenses do we consider free --- and at explaining the rationales behind them. One thing first: The question if we change DFSG and documenting what we think is free (or not) are two entirely different things, and shouldn't be mixed together. I'm replying only to the documenting thing using my ftpmaster hat, the DFSG§10 one is entirely seperate and doesn't really touch ftp* opinions. This has been discussed in various occasions. A recent one within the project is the question time of my talk at DebConf12 [1], thanks to input by Steve Langasek. But our flaws on this matter are being discussed also outside the project border; see for instance the interesting talk The Tragedy of the Commons Gatekeepers by Richard Fontana at LinuxCon North America last year [2,3]. I agree with Richard that, modulo some notable exception like FTP masters' ruling about the Ubuntu Font License [4], we are not doing a good job at documenting and explaining our choices. The best approximations we have are either non-authoritative, or not maintained, or both. The net result is that by searching the web license names and Debian one will likely end up on debian-legal discussions, that are not the official project stance on license free-ness. Bottom line: I'd be very much in favor of dropping DFSG §10 as long as we replace it with a (pointer to a) place where we maintain an authoritative list of licenses we consider free, together with (pointers to) explanation of why it is so. I'm quite sure the explanations do exist already, but we do need people that do the work of finding them and documenting them in a central place. For the place in itself, [5] would be perfectly fine, but needs to be turned in something authoritative (and maintained) as opposed to something that is only advisory. The whole of ftp* agrees that it would be nice to have a place documenting this. So much so that we started something for it in 2009, see http://ftp-master.debian.org/licenses/ for it. You might notice that it is not entirely uptodate. Or listing a lot of it. What it is is a hey, we could do it this way, here is how it can look. And here is an ikiwiki instance in a git, check it out, ftp*. That got it around 31 commits far, and then it slept in. It *is* entirely dull and non-fun and just boring work, with no direct payoff (in NEW/rm you at least have that direct payback :) ). That said, we would be happy to get it back to live and end up with it (either where it is now or wherever fits) being a useful place. Seeing how it directly touches us (decide if $foo can go into the archive and be distributed or not), it certainly makes sense to have it within FTP* overview. That said, it is clear it can't be the FTP Team who is doing the work - the oh-so-recentness of it shows that it is a task that won't get done. There is too much else for us and we are few people only. But we would be happy to work with / lead / whatever-one-names it with a group of volunteers together. Exact details of how that works out are to be found, but im sure we can. If there are volunteers for it... -- bye, Joerg You're in good shape for being a Debian, with a SAP background ... anything has to look good from there... -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87k3roppqa@gkar.ganneff.de
