Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Seth Alan Woolley <seth AT positivism.org>]

On Thu, Nov 03, 2005 at 05:38:16PM +0100, Robert Figura wrote:
> Am Thursday 03 November 2005 07:02 schrieb Seth Alan Woolley:
> 
> > I wanted to ping the list to see if there's substantial support behind
> > meeting their criteria.
> 
> The first question to ask is what would be the purpose of becoming entirely 
> "Free(TM)".
> 
> According to the size of their list i can assume that we'd gain an elitary 
> status which i would consider good. GNU is not the only definition for 
> "free", however it is the most applied one.

It's the one currently in our social contract.

> 
> I assume there is some protection of SMGL users to be gained regarding 
> possible legal issues.
> 

Nope.

> There is also a style component. It >>sounds<< like a good tradition but 
> i'm 
> not completely sure that GNU will maintain it's status of being _the_ 
> definition of free software.
> 

Who would replace them?

> > Change the social contract to eliminate the "we support non-free
> > software" section.
> 
> This is picky. The practical quality of SMGL would decrease if we'd abandon 
> bugzilla support for some spells. I think we cannot afford discarding all 
> documentation not exclusively related to GNU compatible software. (Or only 
> splitting it and weakening it's integrity)
> 

The FSF has a list of stuff not gpl compatible but still free.

> > Eliminate the z-rejected grimoire to be hosted/maintained by a separate
> > system (no SCM or website mingling, grimoire url to be explicitly added).
> 
> Some work to be done here.
> 
> What is about separating grimoire development altogether? Which practically 
> means a restricted social contract for sorcery development and some 
> grimoires but not for the distribution as a whole.
> 
> It might do the trick.
> 

why bother?  Why not just let z-rejected live in its own world?

> > Scan the grimoire for stuff that needs moved to the z-rejected section
> > and do that.  (The FSF keeps a list of GPL-compatible and
> > non-GPL-compatible-but-free licenses.)
> 
> Maybe have another level of 'z-rejected', maybe called 'z-non-gnu'.

Why?  If it's not fsf-free it goes in z-rejected already according to 
our social contract.

> 
> > Switch our SCM to something(s) other than perforce for everything.
> 
> Which is generally a good thing imo but as far as i remember we had 
> practical reasons for using perforce and the question would be if there are 
> Free(TM) alternatives now and graceful migration is possibe with these. I 
> do like bazaar-ng quite much but it lacks some important features.
> 
> > Who thinks this is worth it?  Who thinks it's not worth it?
> 
> I cannot see any reason to make it high priority. I'd also rather like to 
> see having a spin-off which extracts the free components of SMGL.

Why not have a spin-off that adds non-free components to it?

> 
> Feels kind of insulting to be forced not to give the user the coice. 

How would it be forcing a choice?  I'm being forced into supporting 
rejected stuff.  Why should I do that?  Why should our users expect to 
be able to come with us for support on non-free stuff?  We can't 
seriously help them in most cases, and I don't want to have to support 
it.

> But this has been depicted as the dark side of bsd. I like bsd 
> licensing however...

The dark side of BSD licensing is that contributors risk losing their 
contributions to the community to privatization.  Personally, I'd rather 
people paid me for that privilege.  My volunteer efforts go to helping 
freedom, not the profits of the select few.

W35h

> 
> Regards
>   - Robert Figura
> 
> -- 
> /* mandlsig.c v0.23  (c) by Robert Figura */
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-- 
Seth Alan Woolley [seth at positivism.org], SPAM/UCE is unauthorized
Quality Assurance Team Leader & Security Team: Source Mage GNU/linux
Linux so advanced, it may as well be magic http://www.sourcemage.org
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