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Bits from the DPL: FSF, expenses, DSA

Posted on Sat, 26 May 2007 02:13:46 +0200 - Keywords:

chat with the FSF

I had a nice talk with Peter Brown, FSF Executive Director and Brett Smith, Licensing Compliance Engineer. We mostly talked about the GPLv3, the GFDL and the Nexenta project.

The official GPLv3 launch is approaching very fast, and the FSF was wondering how Debian could play an active part in it. As I also said on debian-devel I am not eager to promote the use of this new licence until we know how much of our libraries are GPLv2-only. Any ideas about what Debian could do are of course welcome.

We didn’t talk much about the GFDL. The FSF’s absolute priority right now is the GPLv3, the GFDL will be addressed later. After last year’s GR Debian decided that works under that licence were free if they didn’t use unmodifiable sections. We are still waiting for a fix for the badly worded DRM clause, which the FSF told me they’re going to address. The Wikipedia project also has concerns with the GFDL so we should expect the licence to change a lot.

I opened a licensing questions ticket on May 16th to ask the FSF to clarify their position about the Nexenta and other OpenSolaris projects (full text available here). There are good chances that the answer will be in favour of allowing the redistribution, but it will take the FSF lawyers a few weeks to carefully write it down. I am personally enthusiastic about having this new port in Debian if possible.

disbursement of Debian funds

Around $4,300 USD (3,200 EUR) of Debian funds were spent or pledged to be spent this month, mainly on travel reimbursement for developers attending Debian meetings or representing Debian at various places. I will send any details to debian-private until I’m confident this is the kind of information I can really make public.

DSA team

Three weeks ago I posted about how not many people were proposing to help with the various core teams, and immediately got a lot more candidacies. Two weeks ago I sent a list and short description of 6 of these people to the current members of the DSA team for comment. Depending on what they are going to answer I’ll decide on what to do next.

I haven’t done anything similar about the other teams yet, apart from collecting proposals and ideas.

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