Martin Michlmayr - Debian Project Leader <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > * Henning Makholm <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2004-02-12 01:03]:
>> It would be hard to preserve that attitude if we were to begin to >> contact authors unsolicited. It would be very bad publicity for >> Debian and for the free-software movement in general if too many >> people start > > ... well, it depends who you contact and how you do it. I'm mainly > thinking of licenses which are OSI compliant but not DFSG compliant. > Clearly, those people are interested in "Open Source", and in that > case I think a polite e-mail showing the differences between OSI's > definition and the DFSG and explaining our philosophy is warranted. I'm a bit unclear at this point what problem we're trying to solve. To date, I think there are four potentially interesting cases: - Someone brings license to d-l, short discussion ensues with rapid conclusion. - Someone brings license to d-l, and no one answers. This may be because it gets lost (this happened once or twice during the GFDL discussion, iirc). I've also seen cases where no one answers apparently because the license hangs on a controversial issue and no one's willing to take a stand on it and rehash old flame wars. - Someone brings a license to d-l, and flame wars result. - And what you mention above, where no one brings a license to us but we notice an OSI certified license that's not DFSG free.o I'd say the clear majority of cases fall into the first category, and I'm not convinced that case is broken. Generally that works well because the DD who brought it to us (or sometimes non-DD) gets a clear response and either goes ahead with packaging, or talks to upstream (with whom the DD often has a good relationship). Occasionally the DD disagrees with us and flame wars result, but that's a separate issue. The second case is unfortunate, but I don't think it happens terribly often, and when it does it's usually caught by someone sooner or later. Perhaps something could be done here, but it's (IMHO) not worth a lot of work finding a solution as it's not that big a problem. The third case seems to be the sticky one, but I'm not convinced any of the solutions suggested actually help there. If you're assuming that d-l is having trouble reaching a conclusion (e.g., GFDL), how are systems, appointees, and so on, going to help? Perhaps when this happens we should be more quick to set up someplace for folks to get a current summary of things. This eventually happened in the GFDL debate, and it worked well in the end. This can probably be done on an as-needed, volunteer basis, though. And as for the last case, I personally wouldn't want to touch it with a 10' pole. It's hard enough talking to people about licensing issues without first having to interest someone who probably doesn't care. Though a polite ping, just to see if the licensor is interested, may make sense. -- Jeremy Hankins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> PGP fingerprint: 748F 4D16 538E 75D6 8333 9E10 D212 B5ED 37D0 0A03
