 OK, great. Finally, a controversial talk. We've been waiting for one all week long. So next up, Bradley Kuhn is speaking about the Supreme Court of DFSG Free, which covers holes in the FTP master process from what I've got in the description. And hopefully, there's a few good angry FTP masters in the room, so we'll have some mics available, because Bradley said it's interactive talk, so I think you can ask questions during the talk. Thanks. Although it's interactive at the end, let me get through it. It's been a long time since I gave a talk this controversial. I am known for giving controversial talks, but I don't give them as much as I used to. And so I am a bit nervous, so I hope you'll let me get through my slides to the end, and I'll leave time at the end for you all to yell at me. So first of all, I'm talking about a lot of history, particularly one story that I'm going to tell. So there are links to all the mailing list posts and bug tickets that I've referenced here. Anything in blue on my slides is a link. So you can load that URL, and there's a shortened URL if you don't want to have to type that big long string that I put up there. So the shortened one is ur1.ca slash pfcpb, that's uniformromio1.charliealpha slash papa foxtrot charliepapa bravo. It's ur1.ca slash papa foxtrot charliepapa bravo. You're welcome. So before I start, are there FTP masters and or FTP assistants in the room? And I'd like to ask you to raise your hands, other than I knew Luke was here, but OK. Oh, hi. Hi, I'm sorry, I don't know if I know your name. Chris, OK. So are you an assistant or a master? Assistant, OK. But there's no FTP masters in the room? OK. That'll make it a little easier. Are there ones on IRC? Let me know if ones on IRC start screaming. So actually, my goal here is not to say things have been done poorly up till now. In fact, from my point of view, things have been done beautifully, and I'm going to explain why in a minute. But while I've benefited from the current structure in my political aims, I think that I gained the system a few times, certainly one time that I'm going to tell the long story of. And I think it's possible for others to gain the system as well. And I think at the moment, somebody was just saying before the talk started, the new queue is empty. I don't believe there's a contentious licensing decision before Debian right now. So this in some sense is the perfect time to talk about do we have the right system for considering what is DFSG-free when there's no contentious issue before us. That's the time to think about, hey, maybe for the next time when a contentious licensing issue comes up, we should maybe have a different process. I want to, it's the very longest disclaimer slide I've done in a while. This is really, slides are on conservancy branding, but this is absolutely my own opinion. It's just as a private free software citizen. I didn't even discuss the views of my employer. Karen left yesterday, and I had not written the slide yet. She was on chat this morning, but I did not show her the slide link. I almost didn't, decided not to. She's in the London airport right now, actually, on her layover. So these are all my views. I have political views about pretty much everything. These are my political views about the Debian DFSG process, and I added this one just a minute ago. Someone in the front desk just accused me of being a lawyer again. I'm always accused of being a lawyer. I'm not a lawyer. I spent far too much time in my life around lawyers. I realize I sometimes sound like one, because I've picked up affectations and other ways of speaking from them. But I'm a developer. I have a master's degree in computer science. I used to write code for a living. It's been a long time. Pearl 5 is my best language, if that tells you anything. But I'm more of a computer geek than a lawyer for sure, and I definitely don't want to be a lawyer. But I also think Debian is incredibly special, not just technically, as a computer scientist, but also as a policy walk. Debian is the most democratic software freedom project that has ever existed in the history of free software, period. There's no question in my mind, and it's not even close. I don't know who the second most democratic one is. I can't even think of who it might be, because it's so far behind Debian's level of democracy. And it has codified policies that are clear, that are putting forward what the citizens of Debian care about, and the citizens of Debian care about these policies. People argue about whether they should raise a general resolution about something. That's true, interactive, and engaged democracy. If you have a democracy, though, you have a political structure. You have politics. And politics is somewhat of a dirty word sometimes. People say, well, if you're a politician, which I admit, I'm primarily, I'm not a lawyer, I am a politician. I didn't mean to be one, but I am one. But politics is not necessarily bad. And these are the key issues, I think, that come up in software freedom politics. This happens in Debian all the time. People make uniform decisions that apply to all members of the group. And there is a use of power. Now, the power is granted from the developers. But the power affects the behavior of other people, because there are people in positions of governance. So by the simple definition of politics, at least Wikipedia's definition, Debian is a political environment with politics going on all the time. The license approval process is no different than any other political structure in Debian. Licenses, though, themselves are also their own type of political document. They are, for other free software projects, pretty much all they have by way of a constitution. The license is their constitution. And the set, the meta set of licenses that we accept as open source and free software form kind of a meta constitution. It is the group of licenses we consider acceptable to have free software communities built around. And therefore, DFSG becomes an incredibly important document of itself at that meta level. It's helping decide not just for Debian, but for an entire free software community what licenses we consider right to create these communities around. And so Debian likes to believe its politics and policies are about its own project. But there are ramifications of almost every major Debian decision across the free software world. I have, for years, I've only, like last year, been getting really business as my keynote last year and spending time with all of you here at Debcom for last year. I've gotten excited and interested in Debian. I'm trying to get more engaged. I'm in the early stages, actually. Sorry, my AM's right there, of my non-uploading DD application. And I want to get more engaged in Debian because I'm so excited about its democracy and so forth, particularly in the past year. But for years and years before that, I've closely followed Debian because it's politics. So goes Debian. So goes the free software world. So it has always been a thing as a free software politician I've had to keep very close eye on. So years ago, I guess what's this, four years ago now? A little over four years ago. Richard Fontana, people who in the room does not know who Richard Fontana is. OK, so Richard Fontana is a lawyer. He actually is a lawyer. I worked with him when we were both at the same job long ago. These days, he works for Red Hat. And like me, he's kind of a policy walk. He thinks very deeply and carefully about issues of policy and free software. And he gives pretty excellent talks about various different issues of policy. He's one of these people who only gives each talk once. Generally speaking, I give my talks over and I reuse them. I won't be able to reuse this one because this is very Debian-specific and you all have heard it at that point or watched the video. But I wish he had given this talk more often. He gave it exactly once and there's a link to his slides and a link to an LWN article there that was written about the talk. And he is somewhat of a gadfly. So he tends to just raise issues and raise specter of concern without really proposing specifics. He will probably agree with me about that. But his talk really got me thinking again about this issue of who decides what is an open source and free software license. And I was pretty convinced by his talk that we need continuing multiple bodies that are ruling about licenses. We have two that have always done it, FSF and OSI. I think the third is pretty obviously Debian. I've gone back and forth about whether Debian, over the last 20 years, whether Debian should be the third. I think I'm pretty convinced Debian is the third, easily the close third to say OSI or FSF as far as making decisions about what's a free software license. So enter the story that led me to think so much about this issue. So there's a license called the AFARO-GPL. Who in the room is completely unfamiliar with the AFARO-GPL? Raise your hand. OK, it's OK. I just want to know how quickly or slowly to go through this slide. So AFARO-GPL is basically a soft fork, if you will, a modified version of the regular GPL. It's specifically designed for issues of software freedom on a network service. So historically, the GPL has been focused on the issue of distribution or conveying software to another person. When you give them a copy, you must also give them all the source code and the ability to rebuild it and so forth. AFARO-GPL extends that copy left requirement to networks. So it says, if you give a user legitimate access on a network to your software, you must also give them an opportunity to receive the complete corresponding source for that particular network application. So I actually fought pretty hard to try and add the AFARO clause to GPL proper. There was actually a meeting in 2002 where Richard Stallman wanted to release GPL v2.2 with the AFARO clause in it at that time. And I actually took the wrong side at that time. We tried to convince Richard Stallman to wait and do a GPL v3 process, which we eventually had. I wish I'd taken the other side in that meeting because maybe the AFARO clause would be in the main GPL. But it's not. It's a separate license compatible with GPL that adds this clause. And I am incredibly biased on this point. I invented the idea behind how the AFARO GPL works. It's my one contribution to the idea of copy left. Stallman invented the idea of copy left and it's a stroke of genius. I wouldn't call this a stroke of genius, but it's a nice little tweak on the idea of copy left. And I'm proud of it. And so I have a vested interest in the advancement and proliferation of the AFARO GPL and its widespread use. Now FSF has been probably the first licensed authority. I think it's not probably. It's definitely. FSF was the first. In fact, one of the first things I did as a volunteer for the FSF in the mid 1990s was answer the general contact email that people would email in. And most of the questions at the time, 1995, 1996 era were, is this license that I found a free software license? And so I was the first person to propose, hey, we should put together a license list on the website. This is 1997, 6, 7, right? Not every organization had a website in those days. FSF did. It wasn't just straight HTML site. But I said, hey, we should put this on the web. I actually had to convince Stallman, like, yeah, it really does need to be on the web. We had a conversation about that. So yeah, that's where it needs to be, where everybody can go and look at it on the website. So we put that list up as the known free software license list, and then it's continued to be improved over the decades. And FSF, of course, is the drafter and publisher of the Affair GPL. So of course it's on the free software license list. FSF would not publish a license. It didn't believe the free software license. But I'd be at first to admit, even though I'm on the board of directors of the FSF, FSF is biased in looking at its own licenses. That's obvious. If you write a license and then you say, I think this license is a free software license, of course you do. You wrote it. There's bias there. So we almost can't trust FSF's opinion on its own license. I mean, it's pretty obvious to me, even though my heavy affiliation with FSF, you need another party to view it and say, is it really a free software license? So the obvious authority for it to be submitted to is the open source initiative, OSI, which maintains the list of what is an open source license. So in November 2007, the Afarro GPL was finally released. It actually came out almost a year after the original GPL, or the original GPL V3, rather. And a company that wanted to use the Afarro GPL and employer of that company submitted it to the OSI for consideration just a few months later, maybe actually a month and a half later. And almost immediately, Chris Tabona, the head of Google's open source program office, replies saying, I don't think we should make this an open source license. There's gonna be a huge debate because this is a total change to, you know, usual things people say about the Afarro GPL. Yet, I looked at the timestamps last night. I mean, look how many hours it was between. Chris's post of, we really need to have a big discussion about this to the subcommittee approves it. I mean, it was a matter of hours. And not only that, a couple of days later, the OSI board endorses the committee's recommendation. So, and this is happening like that. And of course, I'm watching this go by, I'm like, yeah, done, we're done, we made it, we made it. Well, I quickly learned that Chris was not happy. Google was not happy. Google was against the Afarro GPL for the obvious reasons, right? They would never take it, I mean, it's still to this day, we'll never, Afarro GPL is foreboding in all of Google. And Chris was really unhappy in particular. I think reasonably so. There was no public discussion about Afarro GPL really on the OSI's list. There was one troll who showed up, the threads are there, you can read them, who tried to troll about a little bit. He actually got, that was the last straw for that particular troll, and he got kicked off the list over this, so the discussion was quelsh because there was this troll that they had to get rid of, and then nobody wanted to say anything more, and then it's just approved. So, there was actually work going on behind the scenes to try and convince OSI's board to reconsider. To at least, so it was said, temporarily, the decision went too fast. So, temporarily take it off the open source license list, let's think about whether we really want the Afarro GPL there. Now, my figuring was this is a perfect political move. Temporary often becomes permanent in politics, if the politics don't go your way. So, a temporary removal in my view was a permanent removal, so I really had to prevent this. Meanwhile, there was, had already been, basically right at Afarro GPL's release, a rather complex debate on Debian legal. And there was kind of a consensus on Debian legal that it was non-free. I call it a manufactured consensus because there were two particular people, which you can read in the links, who were really kind of going back and forth off each other to convince the community that it was non-free. And I didn't know Debian very well as far as this politics of those days. I actually thought a consensus on Debian legal had some sort of binding. So, I was a little worried. I thought there was, and even after people told me, I started asking my friends who were Debian developers and they said, oh, no, no, no, it's fine. I figured it had some authority, right? I mean, I guess I really was naive. I was like, well, it must have some weight that this mailing list kind of came to a consensus. It is the Debian-legal mailing list, isn't it? So, but besides once I even knew Debian legal was not too much to worry about, it was clear that because of the DFSG, because of what was happening in OSI, there had to be a ruling by Debian. Debian was the clear tiebreaker. FSF's biased because it's their license. OSI has moved too fast and now reconsidering. If Debian says a fair OGPL is DFSG free, we're done, I think. We're really done because then everybody just sort of has to say, well, Debian was the real neutral party here. They were able to say, hey, this is a free software license. Now, it's very common to use this very strictly now and I'll give a few examples in a minute that something's politically unviable. You hear this phrase in the larger politics of the world now, very common. Well, that idea is politically unviable. And in fact, what happens is, people who are centrists in politics usually like to use that phrase to avoid being outflanked. So they go to somebody more radical. I mean, this was the Clinton campaign in the US was constant on this about Bernie Sanders. They would say, oh, Bill Clinton would go out and say, well, my wise policies are politically viable, Bernie Sanders are not politically viable. Well, it's a way to say, well, you're a left-wing crazy and if you get into office, you won't actually get anything done. That's the goal there. Now, it's true, in fact, that most new political ideas are politically unviable when they first are proposed. It's actually more often than not, they are. But timing in politics is everything. Everybody thought that the idea of the United Kingdom leaving the EU was politically unviable until it wasn't politically unviable anymore. People thought that Trump being nominated as one of the major party's nominees in my country was politically unviable until he was the presumptive nominee. Political talk shows, as you are from the US, political talk shows just weeks, not even weeks, a week before he had the majority of the delegates, the political talk shows on the weekends were saying, oh no, there's no way he's gonna clinch his nomination. It was politically unviable until it wasn't politically unviable anymore. And if you're trying some political maneuver, when you do it matters much more than what it is. But doing it at the right time matters more than the idea, matters more than how many people you have on your side, et cetera. And what happens in Debian is that pretty much anybody who can upload can decide the timing. Because the new queue is the place to force a DFSG decision immediately. So when you choose to upload at the right time, you choose to force the decision about a DFSG pre-ruling. Which means it's easy to manipulate. So I have a friend named Luik Thakere. He was involved heavily in Debian long ago. You probably don't know him because he hasn't been involved in a long time. He had actually written a replacement to Google Reader. An incomplete replacement. It's still incomplete to this day. It does not help you read RSS feeds. It is basically a proof of concept that you can relatively easily write a replacement to Google Reader. It doesn't actually work. But it was code, and it was under the AFARO-GPL. So I went and found somebody who wasn't known to be a AFARO-GPL advocate to go make in our request for packaging of Yachto Reader. I went back to Luik and said, okay, it's up, let's package Yachto Reader. So I did the package and Luik uploaded it as a DD. So that it was in the new queue, which meant now the decision was before the FTP masters, is the AFARO-GPL license DFSG free or not? Cause it's in the new queue. It's gotta be thought about. Now I picked my timing carefully. I picked June 2008 for a number of reasons. Of course, as I mentioned, there was certain factions in not on the OSI board, but sort of close to the OSI board who were gonna make their case at OSCON in July of 2008 to the OSI board members. I heard that through my back channels. And my hope, obviously my aspiration was, Debbie would make a quick decision, which means by the time we got to OSCON, it would, AFARO-GPL would be DFSG free. But even if that didn't happen, even if the optimal timing didn't happen, at least Debbie will be considering it by the time the OSI board is getting its maximum pressure to reconsider, which means the OSI board can easily say, well, you know what? Debbie is thinking about this right now. We've already ruled. Let's not take it off the list yet until we see what Debbie and says. So it was an opportunity to delay the possibility of this temporary removal of the AFARO-GPL from the OSI's license list. And so I sort of figured at the time, my timing I pretty much got to the end of 2008 because with January 2009 rolls around, they'll probably be, you know, actually I'd seen it the previous year that went the reason that happened so fast in March of 2008 was Russ Nelson kept trying to clear his new queue of licenses and he did that at the beginning of 2008. So I figured he would do a similar process at the beginning of 2009 to clear his agenda. So I figured I'd need this certain before he rolls around and does that again. So I really wanted to get quickly approved and I figured a small program was better. Something that was not of huge interest would be easier to debate about because it's less about the code, right? What happens a lot when a very important software code base is under a dubious license, the thing is wrought with a mix of technical and licensing fights and that conflates the two issues and makes the politics more complicated. A program like Dr. Reader that barely works, that was actually a point against me because somebody could have said, well, it barely works, why are we putting it in the archive anyway? But it worked enough to like it loaded something that looked good. So I figured that was enough to, it's a small program, it does something sort of, why not? Now I kind of almost got thwarted on this because PySoy, which was actually a useful piece of code, somebody came forward and said, oh, I want to package PySoy, but it's under a fair GPL. Can somebody make a ruling? I got kind of lucky because the person who brought that up decided not to bother to package it. It was actually really hard to package as it turned out and this person was not strictly stealing the packaging. So it never actually got packaged, but this guy did open a bug directly to the FTP masters asking the question, is the Afaro GPL DF-SG free? So the outcome here actually surprised me because the outcome came out exactly as I really wanted it to and it also ended up getting a real ruling. Now I asked Paul, when I was prepping this talk, the early days, right after I proposed it, I asked Paul Tagg about some of these issues. He's an FTP assistant and he said, well, don't forget, FTP masters do not decide on licenses. They decide on packages and just because they rule about one package saying it's DF-SG free, doesn't mean another package, even if it's under the exact same license, is necessarily DF-SG free, i.e. there is no precedence-based system in the FTP masters world. This is Paul Tagg's argument. Okay, I mean, I know people probably disagree, but this is what he argued to me. It's really true, that's the scary thing. Yeah, well, not in this case. So this case worked out pretty well because in fact, the FTP masters that November gave really a Supreme Court-like decision. It was not in form of what you would see from the US Supreme Court, but in function it was. They quoted all the arguments that people had made saying it was non-DFSG free or DF-SG non-free and they refuted them and said, no, we don't think that's a viable argument. We think that's wrong. And they refuted all the major arguments from reasonable people and said, we're gonna rule, but this is DF-SG free. And that's linked to there in blue. So there were a few loose ends after this happened. I promoted this on my blog to make sure that I sort of clinched the importance of it and was sure that the OSI was not gonna reconsider. I used some of my back channels to just sort of make sure, hey, OSI, you're really not gonna reconsider it now, that it's Debian, like you're gonna contradict Debian? Don't you remember that the OSD and the DF-SG were drafted very similarly? Like it would be a real problem for the community if they were interpreted differently by two different orgs. So pretty much was able to convince people that it was not gonna work. And I really felt that this was probably the only way to resolve the solution. It could've been all okay. Maybe OSI would not have been convinced by Google to reconsider, who knows? But this was the way to be certain, to really just close all the loose ends and make sure we got there. Now, that didn't stop the fight in Debian, whatever it does stop the fight in Debian. There was a last ditch effort of filing two bugs specifically against Yachter Reader to try and sort of re-force reconsideration the decision. One of them was actually relatively legitimate that I closed, you'll see the link there if you wanna read how we ended up closing it because it was actually a difficulty in downstream complying from the way it was packaged. I fixed that in the package. But the tide had turned at that point, not for Google, this is a link to a 2011 article where Chris is arguing how dangerous the Affair GPL is, he's never stopped. I thought it was gonna ruin my friendship with Chris, it has not, which was good. But I try never to discuss the Affair GPL with him. He occasionally brings it up, I say, Chris, you know we don't wanna discuss that. You know we don't wanna have a debate about the Fair GPL again. I know that Google will never like it, that's pretty much a certainty. So I think about this series of events a lot. Like since 2008, not a month goes by that I don't replay these events in my head. And the thing that bugs me is, as I said, I'm an accidental politician. I didn't think I was gonna be a politician for a living, I thought I was gonna be a developer or a computer scientist or something like that. And I tell the story for last now, but was I sleazy? I don't know, I don't actually know. And did the Debian political system function properly? Is this how it was supposed to work? Is that how the politics are supposed to play out? Or did I game the system? And I admit that I'm not biased here. I got the outcome I wanted, so part of me wants to say, well hey, if I can game this system, I wanna keep gaming it. And I almost submitted this on a whim because I was like, am I gonna share my political secrets to the entire Debian community? I decided it was the right thing to do because I try to be a moral person and I try not to be a sleazy politician. But it could not go my way in the future. Anyway, so it could not go any of our ways in the future. So I really think we have to reconsider. And start questioning, and this is, okay, controversy begins. This is a controversial question. Why is it that the FTP masters are the ones who decide these questions? Why do we do it that way? Well, there's the delegation, right? So they are delegates of the DPL. And people like to point me to these other words which I'm gonna talk about more in a minute about how the delegates, the DPL can't overrule the delegates after the fact and so forth. So maybe that's okay. Now the one question, my first question, and that is, well, is that authority even delegated to the FTP masters? When you read the Debian Constitution, it says that the DFSG is under the control of the developers and the GR should be doing the things with the DFSG, not a DPL delegate because that's who controls the DFSG. And I went back and read at least what I could find. This is a link to the 2012 re-quoting of a previous delegation that Stefano did when he was DPL. I read that delegation. It does not say anything about interpreting licenses, at all. So I don't, I read this in one of York's bits from the FTP master, but I don't see it in the delegation text. So is the authority to decide what DFSG means actually delegated to the FTP masters? I don't know. I'm not sure. And I don't understand why such an important power is completely consolidated in the FTP masters. They do a lot of different things. And a lot of them are not licensing. And I think, honestly, I think one of the reasons, maybe Luke can confirm or deny, one of the reasons the FTP masters like to be FTP masters is because they, this is the part they're interested in. So Luke's nodding. But there's all these other technical aspects to the job as well. So I mean, it doesn't, somebody could be doing the technical aspects and be on a different panel that's doing licenses. There's nothing against, I don't have an objection to that, but why is it consolidated into one place? And I don't know, I think it's too important to be integrated with other tasks. I think it should be its own panel, but who knows, I don't know. I'm just making observations, I'm not sure, I'm not making a recommendation. So the other concern I have is that generally speaking, decision-making about licensing is a pick. In the, a fair GPL is the one example I found that's not. Usually they say they're doing consensus-based decision-making to come to these conclusions, but there's no real minutes of that that show it and it's nothing that binds them to continue to do a consensus-based process. As far as I can tell, whatever FTP master picks up something from the new queue, they can make the licensing decision if they want to and upload it, if they want to and Luke's nodding again. So that's true. So they aren't like court opinions and I think they should be. We don't get them. In the fair GPL case is the only one I can find where there was a court opinion from the court of the FTP masters that said, we believe it's DFSG free and here's why. I think we need to document the decisions of license interpretation. As it turns out, because I'm on the FSF board of directors, I'm part of the committee that evaluates licenses for the FSF. And I'm always arguing in that committee to make longer the text that the FSF releases. Like usually there's one sentence the FSF says, this is non-free because, right? And there's like a short pithy comment of why it's non-free. I'm always arguing to make that four sentences. So you get four reasons why you make it clearer, make it more complete. And so I'm arguing for the same here. I want to see the logic and the reasoning and the refudiation of the arguments that say it's non-free. Even though I disagreed with all the arguments made by the Afaro GPL opponents about why it was non-free, I was really glad that Yorg wrote a complete response to those problems and said, no, these are not problems and here's why. The other problem is precedence. If Paul Teig is actually correct that there is absolutely no precedence set by any decision made by the FTP masters, think about this situation. What if all packages under a particular license are deleted from the archive for other reasons, right? They're just not interesting anymore, they're orphaned and nobody takes them over, whatever it is. Does that make the license not DFSG-free anymore? Because there's nothing in the archive under that license. So it's unknown. Okay, it wouldn't make it not DFSG, it wouldn't make it DFSG non-free, but doesn't it make the question undecided again? And if there's a new delegation of FTP masters, different FTP masters, the next time something under that license is uploaded, it's evaluated again. Do they have to look back at the old precedent? Are they have any requirement to do so? Do they have to consider what happened in the past at all and try to understand its reasoning to figure out what to do next? Now, I also think about what this means in this context, right? So you look at the quote of this idea, the delegation, so to make sure that DPL doesn't have too much power, the DPL can't override a decision already made. But if what I said before is true, if the decision gets made anew the next time, well, over the long term, it becomes kind of meaningless, doesn't it? Because somebody could just wait and wait until the FTP masters were a group of people they wanted, wait until things leave the archive and then upload the package again. Ultimately, the FTP masters are political appointees. I think that trying to pretend we're not a political environment is putting our head in the sand. And they serve at the pleasure of the DPL, not the developers. Regardless of what that text in the Constitution says, they are the DPL's delegates. They serve at the DPL's pleasure. And yes, I know at any point a GR can be called to override a decision relatively easily. I mean, that's pretty much what happened with the FDL, right? But the GR, as we all know, is a very blunt instrument that's difficult to predict, difficult to use, and very contentious to live through. And I would say it boils in the heat of the particular hot situation, right? It just makes it worse. There's this phrase that I forget which two U.S. constitutional directors were talking and they were talking about the issue of impeachment and how easy it was for the one house to impeach someone. And the one was sitting there with a cup of tea and he said, watch when I pour some of my tea into the saucer. It cools so quickly in the saucer but not in the cup. The cup is the house and the saucer is the Senate. So the idea of having another body that's less likely to be so hot and heavy about an issue is a way to keep the separation of powers going. The GR is too politically wrought to be the only solution we have for situations with licensing decisions. So I think this concept is actually, somebody I don't usually agree with who says this, he was actually talking about the fact that we haven't appointed a new Supreme Court justice because the Senate is refusing to hear Obama's nominee right now in the U.S. And probably the next president will end up appointing when it really should be this president in some sense, but his point is pretty, makes sense. The appointment process is political. You put all the politics up front. You fight about confirming the candidate first so that the issues are not so politically wrought. When an appointee hears the issues, they're already appointed and they don't have to worry about serving at the pleasure of some leader or some regime change may change. I believe in independent judiciary. I think policy should be interpreted and that accountability should be there for explaining the reasoning of it. And I think we should evaluate who's making these decisions, not the decisions they make. That part I really agree with, right? We want people making decisions about DFSG-free who have good judgment and understand what the goal of DFSG was, how licenses work, and how they interact with DFSG. And even when they would decide against me, I'm not so worried about their specific views, but their judgment and the ability to do this analysis. And that's what I'm most interested in the political confirmation process. And I don't want them to feel pressure in the context of an urgent decision. I want them to be like the Supreme Court to sit on the bench and wait their sweet time to hear something until they believe they can think about it dispassionately and correctly. There are still lots of ways to game the system. I haven't told you all of them I've ever thought of. I'm not gonna give away every political trick I have. And I don't think we should have those things. I don't think it should be political gameable. And it's also disturbing to me that I don't ever see it asked in DPL elections. Who are you gonna make FTP mess? Are you gonna keep the ones we have? Are you gonna appoint new ones? I don't see that being asked as a key question. Yet DFSG is so important and that's where the power is with regard to DFSG. Now I grew up in a common law country. So I love precedent and I love the idea of overturning precedent is harder than confirming precedent. That to me feels like a comfortable thing because I've seen it my entire life. But I beg of you those not from common law countries to look at the value in this process. Maybe there should be an appeals court for DFSG free. Maybe it should have a separation of powers from the DPL. After all, technical decision with Debian have that. You have the technical committee which has a separation of powers from the DPL because the constitutional drafters of Debian's constitution realize technical decisions should not be too under the control of the DPL because it's too important. You need a separation of powers. Surely interpreting the DFSG is at least as important as the technical decisions. I would probably argue it's more important but I'm biased as a licensing geek but it's at least as important in my view or maybe not, I don't know. This joke is only gonna be good for US people I apologize because you don't know that there is a fast food place in the United States called Taco Bell which you can order a taco or you can order a taco supreme. And the only difference between a taco supreme and a taco is that the taco supreme has tomatoes and sour cream. So maybe the Supreme Court is just a regular court with sour cream and tomatoes. So maybe it's not that important. I don't know. Anyway, I'm happy for your questions. I'm happy for you to yell at me whatever you're feeling you need to do. Hello? Hey, so. Brad, I think first of all I'd like to thank you for starting out by admitting that you're nervous. It's really great to be in a community of humans that are open and willing to work with each other and admit their vulnerability. So I'm going to kind of respond and say my vulnerability here is that I'm afraid I want a process that's gonna balance that's gonna be balanced and it's not just going to be doing what the FSF wants or doing what one side wants here. But I think you make some really good points and I'd like to make you this offer that if you're willing to commit to working to find a process that's balanced, you know, a process where, for example, in the recent CFS debate, there would have been both sides represented and there would have been people in the process who had both sides of some of those issues. Yeah, and I mentioned it, but I won that one, too. Yeah, I understand. And I mean, I don't think the proposal is here because I don't think it's time for proposals yet. I just have tried to boot this conversation. I think we have to have it over a period of time. And I think we have time for one more question that I'm done, unfortunately. Go ahead. Somebody, one more? I have a mic, so I'll speak. I think it's an interesting idea about some sort of committee that can decide on licenses. I think the point that I don't think you necessarily missed but you've just neglected to mention is that the FTP masters aren't making a decision solely on licenses. So it's not the right place for precedent to be established because they make a decision about is the package worthwhile and debilient? Is it technically competent? Is the license clear? Like, the license may be clearly stated, but it may not be clear that everything's under that license. So there's no precedent there on the idea that because one package did or didn't get in, you can make a definite determination about the license. I mean, if your package hadn't got in, it sounds like there were a bunch of good reasons why it shouldn't have gone in any way. It wouldn't have been a Neil McAuffin for the Apparel GPL. So the FTP masters are making these decisions because there's nowhere else doing it and because it is important that we are legally covered in terms of what we ship, but I don't think there's any intention that they're trying to be the guardians of what are and are not. Which is why it's not a delicate appare. Yeah, and I probably was not as clear as I should be if you didn't get that. I actually agree with everything you said. The problem is that the roles are conflated, right? They're deciding a lot of things and the outside world, outside of Debian, doesn't follow that nuance, right? The political outcome would have been, if it had been, if the actor reader hadn't been let in, or if York hadn't posted that message where he actually made a ruling, which is counter to what we've both been saying in that particular case, I think the OSI would have moved it to a temporary list. I think it would have been real trouble for the Apparel GPL because people would have said, well, Debian won't even take it. And they're the crazy freestyle for people like you. So if they won't take it, there's something wrong with your license, right? That's what would have happened politically in my view. The BDale says no. Okay, but we're out of time BDale, so. BDale disagrees with me. He doesn't have a microphone so I will say, BDale disagreed with what I just said and we're done. Thank you. Thank you.