Distribution quotes of the week

I'm not saying we're wrong, necessarily, but the way that Debian interacts with software licenses is truly not the way that nearly everyone else interacts with software licenses. We have non-lawyers with no legal training read them carefully and attempt to apply their rules as if they were written in normal English, very precisely. (In other words, we treat them like they're computer programs.) Very, very few people outside of Debian do this. Elsewhere, people largely divide into two camps: a quick skim looking for obvious issues followed by "meh, good enough," or review by an actual lawyer who is making a legal decision based on legal interpretation, case law, and a risk analysis.

I think we normally arrive at reasonable conclusions, but sometimes we do arrive at conclusions that neither of those other two camps reach, and then we can look oddly out of touch.

My latest personal project has a manual page, unit and integration tests, Debian packaging, a CI project, and a home page. I can install it and run it. It [doesn't] yet do anything useful.