MJ Ray clearly stated on -vote something that's been simmering in my mind for quite some time now.
Could the Debian (or similar) project by entirely DFSG-free? We've had licensing 'debates' on the Debian logo's, as a result of the GFDL issue that came up last year. We have various documents that form the pseudo-legal/ social structure of debian - voting guidelines, the social contract and what not, and we have procedures for changing these and procedures for changing the procedures (all these ultimately being documents somewhere). So could all such documents be encumbered in only a DFSG-Free sense, or would, as MJR implies (see below, from -vote), simply self-destruct? ---- On Wed, 2004-02-25 at 23:51, MJ Ray wrote: > On 2004-02-25 11:57:30 +0000 Zenaan Harkness <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > It kind of feels intuitively attractive to me, to have an entirely > > DFSG-free project producing DFSG-free deliverables. > > Trying to apply the DFSG to the project doesn't seem to work, as I > don't know any definition of software that would include the actual > project acts. We could try to write DFSG-like DFPG, but I am not > clever enough to see how to get a viable project if it can't > discriminate against those who work on destroying it. ---- Let's assuming we leave "acts" out of the discussion since we can't license acts, and talk from a documentation and software. Logos, policies and procedures can (should) be considered documentation, and at least licensed as such. All infrastructure (software - autobuilders and the like) would be licensed DFSG free to be considered part of the project. This seems to lead to a "top level" document (under DFSG license) describing the project, and the requirements for any piece of documentation, software (etc?) to be part of the project: - it must be licensed DFSG-free - it must be packaged according to Packaging Guidelines. - it must be packaged with a statement saying it is part of the project (and yet is only _actually_ a part of it if it meets all these "requirements". FTP Masters self-affiliate themselves with the project. This then leads me to these two points: 1) Clear(er) sovereignty from an individual point of view. 2) A possible reversal of (some of) the points of power (namely, back to individuals). So the questions become ones of what makes most sense in terms of drawing the lines in the sand - what should be responsibility of individuals, what of "committees", what of the "project leader". I guess any/ all these aspects could be made subject to voting. Of course that may conflict with sovereign individuals who wish to do things in their own way regardless of vote. So where does it make sense for individuals to work as a group? And then documentation on this would be useful to bring like minds together. Perhaps this is the real question from all of this: Is Debian's bureaucratic friction quotient optimal? cheers zen -- * Debian Enterprise: http://debian-enterprise.org/ * Homepage: http://soulsound.net/ * PGP Key: http://soulsound.net/zen.asc * Please respect the confidentiality of this email as sensibly warranted.
