[John Galt - Sat, 2 Dec 2000 04:50:58 PM CST] } Is it? What does Debian have to do with EvilCorp that Red Hat or } Slackware doesn't? Why is Debian getting singled out? Why haven't I seen } the same thing on the FreeBSD lists? It looks as if RMS's goal it to make } Debian his own private whipping boys again, just like the crusade about } non-free being too easily available.
We've just attracted attention to ourselves in this case as well. It's a little bit like mp3 warez; "everybody" does it, but it still isn't legal. Now, going up and asking the local authorities whether what you're doing is legal or not is raising up a neon-colored flag... (whether or not this is a smart or stupid thing to do is not the question here, and whether or not distributing mp3s or neglecting to distribute enough copies of the GPL is "morally" good or not is also not the question here.) But your neighbor didn't go up and ask, so he didn't get caught, but that doesn't mean he isn't violating the law, just as you were. RedHat is a company. Non-free stuff is a part of RedHat. RedHat doesn't propose to be free-as-in-speech, and neither does Slackware. (And there are a helluva lot of copies of the GPL sitting around your standard RedHat install. Probably also a typical Slackware install. Maybe even FreeBSD.) We, however, do. We go out and say "We are a free distribution." We make a big deal about separating our packages based on DFSG compliancy. The GPL isn't the *only* DFSG license, but it's pretty popular among our packages. This probably raises some kind of bar of standards somewhere for us. What's going to happen when the GPL eventually gets dragged into court against a company? They might hit us and say "Hey, look at this so called 'free-as-speech' distribution. They don't follow X of the GPL. Therefore..." We're big enough that it may just matter. It's a rather hypothetical situation, though, but not unimaginable. So... we're caught on a technicality. We're supposedly the "most" free of Linux distributions out there. We're violating the GPL, one of the most popular licenses for our own packages. I don't think we pass Go and collect $200. I think we try to roll for doubles. -- An Thi-Nguyen Le |If you give Congress a chance to vote on both sides of an issue, it |will always do it. | -- Les Aspin, D., Wisconsin
