|| On Wed, 14 Nov 2001 12:14:24 +0000 || MJ Ray markj@cloaked.freeserve.co.uk wrote:
mr> Does the FSF have something similar to the Debian Social mr> Contract?
Other than in its work and documents? I'm not aware of anything beyond the GNU manifesto or the basic documents about Free Software that would read comparably to the Debian Social Contract.
But it is important to keep in mind that the Debian project and the FSF are rather different organizational models - other than the FSF, Debian is more or less a loose bunch of people getting together for a single project.
Being a registered charitable organization for Free Software, the FSF Europe must only do things that further Free Software. Should we somehow violate this policy, the German (or other local) authorities would come down on us. Control for these things is actually rather strict.
I don't know the details for the FSF in the U.S. as I'm not involved in the administrative work, but I would assume things are similar there.
Also since the U.S. copyright assignment is not valid in most European countries, we are working on writing a copyright assignment that will be valid in Europe.
As copyright assignments are essentially contracts, there is a certain amount of freedom involved in their creation, so we included a part that the FSF Europe guarantees the author that it will never abuse the assigned copyright for proprietary software.
We haven't published it as it isn't completed yet, but as soon as I find some time to finalize it together with our lawyers, we will do so.
This is what we did with savannah.
mr> But Savannah is another island based on the sourceforge code. It mr> is a clone, not an alternative and looks poor when compared to mr> the original.
Technically speaking it may be a clone, but it is an alternative in terms of freedom as it was carefully set up to only use and host Free Software.
Of course the technical issues can and should be improved, but that is another issue.
mr> Please, if you must criticise, do it as part of promotion of mr> alternatives, not promote alternatives as part of a criticism.
You are right, it might have been better to end the document with a more postitive outlook on alternatives.
mr> Sorry, perhaps I have not been clear in this forum, although I mr> ... mr> organisation, I think that the FSF is a realist, although it mr> contains some fundamentalists.
Okay, I now understand your statement better. I believe this is not how the majority would use the term "pragmatist," though, so communication problems are to be expected. I'll try to keep your definition in mind for the next time we have a discussion.
Regards, Georg