FS/OSS license: not quite enough of a requirement

Alexandre Oliva aoliva at redhat.com
Sat May 12 08:48:45 UTC 2007


On May 12, 2007, Rahul Sundaram <sundaram at fedoraproject.org> wrote:

> Alexandre Oliva wrote:
>> I really don't understand the kind of opposition I'm getting in this
>> issue.  I know I've brought up other controversial ones, but this is
>> not it.  This is just meant to codify what I thought we had consensus
>> on.

> Nobody is opposing what you are saying but what you are saying is
> getting lost in all the rhetoric questions.

Oh, thank you.  Can you please point at any rhetoric question in the
message that started this thread?  Or any rhetoric question I wrote in
the entire thread?

> You got to stop doing that if you want to get your message across
> since trying to read your actual point in between all these is
> getting tiresome.

My actual point has been the same all the way from the beginning.

  Is Fedora committed to respecting its users' freedoms?

We started down this road many years ago.

But every time we get back to this topic, somehow there's some need to
discuss something with the FSF, some need to clarify some point about
what it would take to list Fedora on some web page, why some other
distro is or is not listed on some web page that is completely out of
my control.

I DO NOT CARE ABOUT THESE THINGS.

What I care about is whether Fedora is willing to commit to respecting
users' freedoms.

In this regard, I don't care about what you think the FSF thinks.  I
am not the FSF.  I don't even speak for FSFLA.  I'm a user asking for
clarifications on whether Fedora is willing to respect my freedoms.

And the respect I get back is (paraphrased) "You're not helping, shut
up", "Take your rhetorics elsewhere", "I didn't read what you wrote
and I can prove it", "I will answer your questions if you force the
FSF to change their web pages.", "I don't understand what you're
talking about so I'll assume it's something I can easily disagree
with."

Do you have any idea of how disrespectful this is towards myself and
the organization I work for?

I wish you wouldn't do this any more, if you would like to remain in
the receiving end of my respect.  Because, you know, respect is
supposed to be mutual.


> Then write up a draft policy following instructions at
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Committee#head-bc786fd8400956418c30ac87c30733f0c008b146

Remember that message where I stated that I realized my proposal did
not fully match current practice (non-Free firmware)?  It was in reply
to this.  But I asked for feedback before going ahead.  Is it so
urgent to drive me elsewhere, or did you just miss the bit about
asking for comments too?

> The next board meeting when folks are back from the Red Hat summit we
> will discuss things and do the changes necessary.

I thought we were already discussing things.  And clearly the point
hasn't come across yet, and drafting the policy without having the
need for it understood will do no good.  So why rush me to do it?

> Good that you don't want non-free documentation because GNU FDL with
> invariant sections is IMO clearly non-free and I would like to clarify
> the guidelines to not include such documents too.

I'm not sure what goal you're trying to achieve with this, but please
don't assume I support this move.

And then, I shall point out that any document containing a copyleft
license contains an invariant section.  So are you going to ban
documentation licensed under the GPL because you aren't allowed to
modify the letter of the GPL in it?  Doh!

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
FSF Latin America Board Member         http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}




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