[fc-uk-discuss] What is Art? [Long]

[MJ Ray]

Rob Myers <rob at robmyers.org> wrote:
> OK but don't tell Lessig. He says it's bad to remember the books you 
> read in college. ;-)

Is Lessig and advocate for the out-of-your-skull approach to student
life?  I generally can't remember whether I read them in college.  (
But I have to look stuff up and do arithmetic to work out how long I
was there for.)

[...]
> Since Debian Legal only "tolerate" the GPL and had great difficulty 
> working out that chmod isn't DRM I'm not sure this is a great problem. ;-)

It's "tolerated" in that it's a well understood free software licence
explicitly mentioned in the Debian Free Software Guidelines.
In other words: what the devil is being quoting here?  It doesn't
sound like the debian-legal contributors I know.

Also, AIUI, it was we don't even know whether the most protectionist
countries will regard certain botched anti-DRM language as prohibiting
chmod; not that chmod was really DRM.

It is pretty depressing to see self-described free culture enthusiasts
piling into debian, one of the earliest strongly freedom-friendly
operating systems, in this half-cocked manner.  Then the freedom
advocates in debian get flamed more because all this flaming has
ensured that there's a significant knee-jerk everything-in-main-type
vote any time anything to do with free software licensing arises.

[...]
> Debian, like CC, have confused their bureacratic interests with their 
> principles.

Debian is an operating system.  Don't anthropomorphise it.  It hates
that.

> The DFSG or the existence of NC is not a good thing in 
> itself. They are meant to be the reflections of principles, not abstract 
> rules carved onto stone tablets that principles must be dropped to 
> support. Sadly in both cases the stone tablet approach prevails.

Nonsense, at least on the Debian project's side.  From the DFSG FAQ:

    The DFSG is an attempt to articulate our criteria. But the
    DFSG is not a contract. This means that if you think you've
    found a loophole in the DFSG then you don't quite understand
    how this works. The DFSG is a potentially imperfect attempt to
    express what free software means to Debian. It is not
    something whose letter we argue about. It is not a law.
    Rather, it is a set of guidelines.

<URL:http://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq>
DFSG and Software License FAQ
(Needs some small updates.  Another thing added to the TODO.)

Hope that corrects,
-- 
MJ Ray - see/vidu http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
Somerset, England. Work/Laborejo: http://www.ttllp.co.uk/
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