Is Your License Really Free? Take the Debian Test!

It’s possibly the most self-indulgent FSF argument ever. Even if licensing is so all-consumingly important, there are really only three positions to take.

1. Paranoid schizophrenic. This would, of course, be the GPL in any or all of its glories.
2. Spit and hope. This is the (very fine) FreeBSD alternative.
3. Do What The Fuck You Want To. From the admirable http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/.>

Debian, from http://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html, has an entirely different set of three brain-ticklers:

1. Imagine a castaway on a desert island with a solar-powered computer. I’m thinking bikinis, coconut oil, popping a prawn on the barbie, and possible bilharzia at a later date. I’m supposed to be worried about fucking licensing for free software at this point? Does the solar-powered computer come with a TV aerial so’s I can watch Lost? I may need some practical hints after I’ve peeled a few bikinis and prawns…
2. Consider a dissident in a totalitarian state who wishes to share a modified bit of software with fellow dissidents. Please. Twenty million pointless deaths in Stalinist Russia, and the worst thing the old bastard ever did was some sort of brain-damaged blood-clot spumed ukase banning distribution of software modifications? Get a sense of proportion.
3. Imagine that the author is hired by a large evil corporation and, now in their thrall, attempts to do the worst to the users of the program…

Apparently the worst that said thrall can do is not to force them (eyelids peeled open a la Clockwork Orange) to watch the Sarah Palin Ice Spectacular, “My Life, My Mooses, My Collection Of Orthodontics!”

No, it’s even worse. But, don’t worry! “The license cannot allow even the author to take away the required freedoms!”

Remind me again, Josef: How many divisions does the Pope have?