Richard Stallman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Your casual suggestion to "pick whichever seems better" leaves out the > object: better for whom? For the Free Software community? For the > Free Software Foundation, whose goals are quite different? > > That is a cheap shot, because it reflects only your decision to be > nasty.
Excuse me? I've been trying to conduct a polite conversation. I certainly haven't made a "decision to be nasty" or started taking cheap shots: the FSF's goals are indisputably different from those of the members of the Free Software community. The FSF's goals are its attempt to fulfill the *best interests* of the community -- this is one of the best arguments for the GPL and copyright assignment to the FSF, that it will work towards the long-term interests of Freedom, not for the wants and goals of the current members of the community. > I could make the same kind of cheap shot by saying "Better for > whom? For the Free Software community? Or for Debian, whose goals > are quite different?" And certainly, Debian's goals are different from those of the FS community: Debian's goals are its users *and* Free Software. > I choose not to do this, but others do it to me. You have done this several times in this thread. For example: > The Free Software Foundation built the free software community, > years before Debian was started, This is at least much of a "nasty cheap shot" as what I said. And you've done it before. The FSF has done wonderful things for the Free Software community, but it is false to claim it had sole responsibility for the community. > (Frankly, I didn't even think about "better for whom". I certainly > didn't imagine it meant "Better for the FSF". In the FSF we avoid > these gray areas, so we would never be the ones deciding.) You mean you *ignore* those gray areas. As a reminder, we're talking about gray areas between program and documentation. The emacs manual contains both. TeX is both. The FSF has signed off on both as being Free -- one as documentation alone, the other as software alone. Debian avoids those grey areas by insisting everything be treated as software: it's not a perfect approach, but it gets the abstract philosophy out of the way and gives more time for producing a Free OS. It's the FSF, not Debian, which has chosen to introduce a classification system, separating Software from Documentation. Many of those on this list have asked about your reasons for doing so, and we've never gotten a clear response -- some allusions to convenience for printers, I think, and that's all. But given you've defined this split, and you want Debian to follow your lead in this, it seems only reasonable for you to provide a good guideline... telling us that *we* should "pick whichever seems better" doesn't help much with that, so your suggestion that Debian permit restrictions on documentation which it would not permit for software is so far unconvincing. > Cheap shots like this are another reason why I have decided not to > discuss the matter further. Wonderful to hear. Debian's pulled its too-passionate-to-talk-reasonably members off this discussion and sent in cooler heads; who will the FSF be sending to talk to Debian, now that you're too upset to continue? I dare not speak for even all the readers of debian-legal, but I for one am eager to continue discussing this with the FSF. -Brian
