[Gllug] LDP licence and Debian.

[William Palfreman]

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"

> Especially the `requires approval by author' stuff in it is a
> killer. What happens if the author is dead or uncontactable? Why, then
> you can't modify the text at all.

That does break it, true.
 
> 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;
and using the GPL allows everyone to benefit from this, without any
votes or annual committee elections taking place.

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
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
anyway, Debian's non-commercial status makes a Cygnus style business
impossible - and EPOS is meaningless without service businesses.  You
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.

> 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.

Regards,
Bill.

[0] Thinking about, but not doing.  IBM Sure-1 Pentium tills are
expensive secondhand, and I don't currently know enough about
programming/high level scripting languages or databases.  Once I get
hold of a till I will probably start.

-- 
W. Palfreman. 		http://www.palfreman.com/william/
Tel: 0771 355 0354	PGP ftp://ftp.palfreman.com/pub/wfpkey.asc
			PGP id: 0x26C72581


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