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Re: gnuplot



> > So in all:
> >   - we can still play around with gnuplot even with the silly gnuplot
> >     licence.
> >   - we shouldn't change our guidelines because of silly licencis
> >     other people have.
> 
> You realy love these guidlines, Joost, don't you?

Yes, I do:)
As do 72 (or 78) out of 80 debian Maintainers.

> It is not the reason to think that those who don't are silly though.

I'm sorry if I didn't express myself clear here. I meant silly licences,
not silly people. I never called anyone silly (see above).


> Situation with gnuplot just shows that it is not the time to become more
> strict regarding policy on license requirements. If we realize, much too
> often we hear on license changes recently.

Like the intention of the Lyx people to move away from Xforms
(and thus apply for the DFSG), and the (quite a few, actaully)
packages that recentely changed their license and are now within
the DFSG. Oh, did I mention willows already?

> If we continue to be that
> strict, we gonna end up with 3 packages in the main distribution

Yes, I can see the clear trend already:

Two years ago, the main distribution had about 100--200 or so packages.
One year ago, it was something like 300-500.
Nowadays, it's of the order of 1000.

With such convincing statistics, I'm sure next year we'll have 3 packages
left.


And, now for why I like the DFSG so much: they PROVE that you are
wrong. Any package that compiles with the DFSG can _always_ be
maintained by debian, and _never_[1] has to leave our main distribution.
Yes, maybe the authors change the licence of the most recent version,
but we are always able to split the package,and maintain a
version of the last-free version of the package.

>, not
> including even kernel  (development of this i2o thing in the undesired
> direction might lead to that). 

That will never be the case. The "appendix H" stuff for the Pentium 
(those docs were also NDA) didn't cause the kernel to be NDA
or whatever, the kernel hackers just eighter found other ways
of obtaining the information (looking at the docs of related chips),
or didn't use the information. The i2o stuff is no worse than
the NDA Pentium Appendix H stuff. (and, appart from that, I've
got the i2o docs on my HD now, I never seen appendix H).


> Get real, failure to be placed into the Debian main distribution is not
> the way of influence licensing.

Failure to be placed on sunsite might though.

But I agree, Debian on it's own is unlikely to change the gnuplot licence.
So?

The main goal of Debian is to develop a good FREE system.
Gnuplot isn't free, so it doesn't belong in the main system.

> But the world would be way too simple to deal with if all the software
> satisfy our FSG. And all attempts to simplify it failed in the past.
> (I am sure you can come up with examples yourself, in case you would like
> to know what I mean, I can explain in private email - this is not the
> topic suitable to this list).

Yes, like the willows stuff (now GPL). And I remember several
other packages where requests from Debian maintainers actually resulted
in the authors changing the licences.

The only major package that change away from GPL was gccwin32 
(or something), but we still have a GPL thread on our system, so
that didn't reduce the number of packages available for Debian.


> Don't you think that in addition of shiny goal (FSG for all) we would also
> have solid and reasonable rules to deal with the real world.

I think 1000 packages by itself form quite a Real World, and that
is a Free Real World.

Yes, there are interesting packages outside our maindistribution. But
the DFSG compilant packages really do form a interesting, and
very workable software distribution too.


[1] Obviously, gnuplot never fullfilled the DFSG.

-- 
joost witteveen, joostje@debian.org
#!/usr/bin/perl -sp0777i<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<j]dsj
$/=unpack('H*',$_);$_=`echo 16dio\U$k"SK$/SM$n\EsN0p[lN*1
lK[d2%Sa2/d0$^Ixp"|dc`;s/\W//g;$_=pack('H*',/((..)*)$/)
#what's this? see http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/


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