Are you reading the list? I'll CC you on this message (deviating, for the moment, from list policy of not CCing without request, and hiding from Branden); if you don't want CCs, let me know. (If you do, you should add a Mail-Followup-To header.)
On Mon, Jan 27, 2003 at 04:58:01PM -0500, Russell Nelson wrote: > Fair enough, but do you really expect people to study the archives? > For example, Google knows nothing about "debian-legal RPSL", implying > that you never discussed the RPSL. The correct way of finding out if a license is DFSG-free is to ask debian-legal. People frequently do this, even for very simple, BSD-ish licenses (and cases that don't require discussion--the majority--generally get a reply very quickly). > A search of the Subject: headers > between last July and now shows no instance of RPSL, or Real. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2002/debian-legal-200207/msg00448.html "RealNetworks" is in the subject, and the search on lists.debian.org doesn't find partial matches by default. I don't know why Google doesn't have that indexed. > Why not change the DFSG? There have been several good reasons explained for leaving the DFSG as a set of human guidelines, rather than a word-strict block of legalese that attempts to remove all human judgement from the equation. I can't find them at the moment, though, and I'll leave the explanation to someone who can do so better than I can. Even if this was done, DFSG freeness isn't a guarantee that a package will be included in Debian. For example, a game with half a gigabyte of data, all of which is DFSG-free, would most likely not be included in Debian; and software which has no interested Debian developer is unlikely to get into the archive. DFSG-freeness is necessary, but not always sufficient. -- Glenn Maynard
