Re: [Fsfe-uk] Re: ECF/ESF

[Chris Croughton]

On Tue, Oct 05, 2004 at 02:04:00PM +0100, address@hidden wrote:

> First, we all owe a huge debt to the Debian legal team, the FSF team, and
> others like them for nitpicking. Small problems in licenses could be
> exploited by nasty people to create large problems for the community. So
> it's well worth getting every detail "right".

Oh, true, and I have no problem with such nitpicking as long as it stays
on debian-legal or wherever.  The problem is when it overflows onto
other areas and affects users (like saying "you can't use your favourite
window manager (or if you want to do so you have to get and build it
yourself) because we don't consider it 'free' enough"), that sort of
thing will (and does) put potential users off.

> The DRM clause looks to me like a good example of a potentially massive
> loophole, since it's quite possible that, for example, a major
> distributor could, ten years down the line, prevent a raft of Free
> Software from making use of their content because the software encrypts
> data traffic. Of course they intended to make a stand against the kind
> of bad DRM that we are all familiar with. But it needs to be done
> correctly, otherwise it's simply nice words with no legal backbone.

Like so many of the rest of the laws, it's more of a threat than
actually providing protection most of the time.  For that matter, the
"shrink-wrap" licence is allegedly illegal in the UK and other places,
but that doesn't stop MS and others using it.  Indeed, the standard
disclaimer about "if it doesn't work you can't get your money back
(unless it's provably a fault in the media)" is a direct contradiction
of the Sale of Goods acts, but you try to get a refund under "unfit for
purpose".

> The second issue, of course, is simply disagreeing over what is right and
> wrong in a license. There you can simply say: I think Debian is wrong on
> the GNU FDL, and I choose not to use Debian. There's no harm in Debian
> taking their own stance on licenses though. And for Debian users (I'm
> not one, by the way), they can be sure that no big suit could ever sue
> them for license abuse. Likewise I'm unsure about Debian's points
> regarding the attribution clause... they merit more thought, but
> there's no harm in Debian saying they won't accept it, and you and I
> deciding otherwise!

I do use Debian, and like it, and mostly agree with their attitude, but
having seen some of the recent decisions about stuff being chucked out
on principle I may have to change just to be able to use some software I
need.  /I/ can (and do) install things from source, but I can't
recommend Debian to a lot of people because they can't do that
(unfortunately not everyone uses the same build tools, so even the
'standard' ./configure && make && make install sequence won't always
work).

> Of course internal disagreements might not look slick and professional to
> the outside world, but then that's a matter for people like OSS Watch
> and IBM to solve :-) There's little point in compromising on freedom
> for the sake of being slightly more attractive in the short term.

It's not just slick and professional, it's things like "If I can't use a
package I need easily becaise it's not 'ideologically pure' then I'm not
going to bother with it at all".  It's why I still use Windows for
certain things, because there are no packages which do some of the
things I want and need under GNU/Linux, and as a user I need them to
work now, not spend several hundred (or thousand) man-hours writing them
myself (and I don't have thousands of pounds to pay someone to write or
port them, either).  Heck, I haven't managed to get sound working under
GNU/Linux at all on any of my machines yet...

Yes, debian-legal and other such discussion fora are useful, I wouldn't
argue against them being essential, but there is a danger in taking them
too literally because if you take almost any laws, licences etc. to
extremes you find that almost anything /could/ happen, if people really
want to make trouble and take away freedom.  I'm rather a lot more
worried about some of the other losses of freedom in current UK law, if
someone takes them to extremes...

Chris C