Sorry, I'm still catching up. I found myself short an Internet connection at this year's Mardi Gras so I'm wading through a few hundred emails.
I'm not prepared to respond to this at length in this message but I will summarize some thoughts. I'm in the process of preparing a full document discussing these ideas. The underlying reason I see an advantage to the community encouraging a unified definition of Free Software is government legislation. It is fairly obvious to me that neither patents nor Free Software are going to go away anytime soon. As a result we are going to see various compromises made about what is and what isn't fair play as legislators work through these problems. If legislators are left with a confusing picture of what the community wants then we can be assured that those compromises will not make us happy. Therefore, it is in the best interests of the community to overcome the obstacles blocking a unified process. Whether the various players can do that is a different matter entirely. The other path open to us, and this is something I am addressing in my document, is to aggressively grow Debian's user and developer base to the point that other definitions become irrelevent. This path, while difficult, is largely a logistical problem and perhaps more approachable. E On Tue, 2003-03-04 at 15:40, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote: > Russell Nelson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > Ean, could you explain to Thomas why you think we should have one > > definition of Free Software? > > Excellent! I think there should be only one definition too. But I > don't think the OSD should get any votes in the process. Sorry, but > you all have not demonstrated your comptence to me in this regard. I > think the FSF has an admirable definition; I think that Debian has a > workable enough one for its limited purposes. I think the OSD has > proven itself not sufficiently trustworthy to be in charge of the > task. -- _____________________________________________________________________ Ean Schuessler [EMAIL PROTECTED] Chief Technology Officer 214-720-0700 x 315 Brainfood, Inc. http://www.brainfood.com
