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Definition of Planet to be Announced in September
MasaMuneCyrus writes "After over seven years of debating, the International Astronomical Union announced that it expects to announce the official definition of a planet in September. After many-a-deadlock, they handed the task of deciding exactly what a planet is to a new committee, which includes historians and educators. 'They wanted a different perspective from that of planetary scientists,' said Edward Bowell, an astronomer at Lowell Observatory who is also vice president of the IAU's Division III-Planetary Systems Sciences group. If all goes according to plan, the wording will be proposed in their 12-day General Assembly meeting in Prague."
Wow, I'd never looked at debial-legal before, so I went there and the first thing I saw was people arguing over whether the GPL itself violates the Debian Free Software Guidelines...
You have to realise that people keep raising absurdist interpretations in an attempt to discredit debian-legal, or because they're naive. The simple fact is that debian-legal is the only place where such matters get seriously discussed - and yes, it is important to seriously consider whether or not the GPL is free, and not just assume that it must be.
The reality of the matter is that the consensus is roughly that the GPL is barely within the bounds of the DFSG - so in a sense, the GPL marks the outermost limit of what is free software. That is consistent with the history of its creation. Of course, since the GPL is so close to the line, it is not difficult to find variations in interpretation that could push it over. It's actually possible to utilise the GPL in a non-free manner if you really want to - the easiest ways involve abuses of sections 7 and 8 (about implied restrictions via patents, and geographical restrictions based on local idiocy).
In the case you're referring to, it's a very old issue. The text of the GPL itself has a legally ambiguous statement about whether or not you can modify that text, creating a new license. The FSF give inconsistent advice on this matter; some times they say that the GPL cannot be modified, other times they say that it can so long as you don't call it the 'GNU GPL'. The position of debian-legal is that (a) license statements included with the packages may not be modified anyway, because then they would be lies - it'll never be legal for you to go and change the license terms to say whatever you want, and (b) the text of the license itself may or may not be free, but that doesn't matter because Debian is not distributing collections of license texts (only the actual license terms for a specific package), so the question is moot. Creative Commons might be interested in distributing texts like that, but it's not directly relevant to a free *software* distribution.
Of course, that doesn't stop people from bringing it up every few months.
[Crow:] "I mean, you're the same Lewis that runs this place?"
[Lewis:] He shrugged. "Nobody runs this place that I know of." He paused, took a sip from his jug. "I do, however, own this rock. Have for a long time." He turned again to Lya. " Raised it from a pup. Boulder to you. Yep," he continued, patting the turf fondly beside his leg, "boulder first then he became, uh..."
"Bigger?" Lya offered.
"Right," he nodded. He eyed her with scrutiny. "Hey, you know an awful lot about this sort of a thing for a hussy. So where was I? Oh, yea. Boulder, then a bigger boulder--all easy so far. But next comes the toughie when he got to be an asteroid." He shook his head. "Ugly, ugly, stage in life, le me tell you, is that adolescent asteroid period. No respect at all. No values."
"But with a will of iron," broke in Lya, "and the determination of a god...."
Lewis looked delighted. "Golly, that's pretty! Oh, yeah. With iron will and the determination of a god, I..." he paused, right index finger poised, "I did it."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armor_(novel)
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!