[Gllug] LDP licence and Debian.

[Nix]

On Mon, 10 Dec 2001, William Palfreman muttered drunkenly:
> On 9 Dec 2001, Nix wrote:
> 
>> (This stuff is all publically available, and very easy to find; why
>> did you think the GLLUG list, of all places, would be a better
>> information source than the Debian list archives?)
> 
> Fair point.  I suppose it was more of an exclamation rather than a
> question - "This seems over-fussy" rather than "This is a genuine
> question and I can't find answers from a search engine"

Have a look at <http://lists.debian.org/>; all the searchable archives
of half a decade's pedantry you could desire.

(If you desire *more* pedantry than that, I suggest counselling.)

>> Doesn't seem very free to me, and `constitutionalism' doesn't come into
>> it. I know of very few cases of Debian `putting constitutionalism in
>> front of actual freedom', as the constitution (or, more to the point,
>> the DFSG) isn't totally unchangeable; if it turned out broken, there'd
>> be a vote to fix it. 
> 
> This would have hit my own suspicion of democracy and constitutions in
> general - I much prefer the informal/peer acclaim/elite approach of, say,
> Linux kernel development.  If people don't like it they can fork off;

The problem with doing a distro that way is that you have to trust
package maintainers to maintain a sort of global coherence, since none
of the packages they're packaging work terribly hard to do
that. Therefore, you need a thing to follow that says what makes the
distro coherent (the Policy), and a way to make sure that developers
know WTF they're doing, since if they don't they can break everyone's
system at once (the new maintainer procedures). Plus, Debian has a moral
raison d'etre (the Social Charter from which the DFSG is derived).

And to keep all this gunk going there are jobs that nobody wants to do,
so elections are held to find people sufficiently crazy that they don't
run away screaming when the job is proposed, but not so crazy that
everyone else runs away from *them* screaming. It's not as though the
Debian `officials' (or developers, for that matter) have any special
ways of communicating that we don't; email and mailing lists. And all
the policy is decided by flamefests; eventually, it might go to a vote,
since Debian has no benevolent dictator, so has to decide things by a
method more reminiscent of the way Usenet does things than the Linux
kernel.

The Big 8's procedures are an interesting parallel, actually.

> and using the GPL allows everyone to benefit from this, without any
> votes or annual committee elections taking place.

No :( if two packages are grossly inconsistent you can't benefit from
both at once without massive pain. If using two packages at once is a
massive pain, Debian as a distro wouldn't exist at all.

> I've been thinking about starting an open source EPOS system for some
> time [0].  Something like that would probably have to be end-to-end, and

Probably.

> the obvious base distribution would be Debian - it gives you a
> consistent reliable OS, with precisely predictable upgrade path for your
> customers. But I wouldn't want something like that to be part of Debian
> proper, as the democracy side could get you kicked off the project, and

Or, rather, you'd write some `upstream' software that did your magic
EPOS stuff, and add it to a Debian-forked distro (probably just Debian
stable with your extra packages). You (or someone else!) could even
maintain the packages for Debian proper; the fact that you're packaging
them for something similar to Debian makes it even easier.

> anyway, Debian's non-commercial status makes a Cygnus style business
> impossible -

*boggle* Emphatically *no*!

You can't use exactly Cygnus's (and/or the compiler-development bit of
RH's) business model, because that's half-predicated on doing ports to
new CPUs for vendors who want it, giving them the source (GPLed of
course) and promising that it won't go into mainline GCC for a while;
with no `new CPUs' concept for an EPOS, that makes little sense for
you.

But you *can* contract with organizations to add wizzo new features to
(a constantly re-merged fork of) your EPOS distro, with the proviso that
you fold those changes back into the mainline *only after a while*, so
that the business that paid for the work gets sole use of those features
--- unless, of course, someone else reimplements them for the public
trunk of your EPOS system, or your customer decides to distribute it
itself (as of course it can).

Yes, you always have the risk of your customers going into competition
with you --- but why would they want to? The kind of organizations that
buy (and/or pay to extend) EPOS systems aren't the kind that will want
to run a service business based on one!

(Likewise, for Cygnus, the kind of organizations that pay for GCC to be
extended either are hardware companies who explicitly don't want the
burden of supporting a compiler --- or why else would they get Cygnus to
do it? --- or, at the very least, know they don't have a hope of getting
as far up to speed on GCC as all of Cygnus/RH. So they don't bother.)

> would use the GPL though, because it allows you to be open source at the
> same time as stopping rivals from taking your hard work and vanishing
> into the proprietary yonder.

They can still take it and go into competition with you, of course, but
they'd have to play by the same rules :)

>> s/professional/amateur/, as it's done for the love of it :)
> 
> This is why people coin new words.  "Orientated to beneficial results"
> sounds like a Ian Banks' Culture ship.

Oh yes, the Killer class ROU `Focus on the Beneficial Consequences'.

I see a great need ;)

-- 
`The situation is completely under control. All of them were killed.'
     --- Alim Razim, for the Northern Alliance, demonstrating fine
         command of traditional Afghan prisoner control techniques.

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