Matthew Garrett wrote: > Glenn Maynard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>I also don't understand why anyone would actually want to defend patch >>clauses. There are very few of them left, so I don't think there's much >>of that "don't want my pet package declared non-free" agenda going on, >>and it seems like an obviously unreasonable hurdle to reuse. It seems >>like a compromise whose time has passed. > > I'm not going to defend patch clauses. I think they're massively > horrible things, and the world would be a better place without them. But > deciding that they're not free any more would involve altering our > standards of freedom, and I don't see any way that we can reasonably do > that.
Why not? There is an established procedure in place for doing so. Obviously such a thing should not be done lightly, but that doesn't mean it cannot be reasonably done at all. It would be useful, before proposing a GR to do so, to have a list of all the packages currently in main which would become non-free if this clause were abolished, as well as any well-known licenses which might be affected. Offhand, the only package I know of which is currently in main and under a patch-clause license is gnuplot, and I don't know of any well-known DFSG-free licenses (used on more than one project) which include a patch clause. - Josh Triplett
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
