Package Maintainers Flags policy

Dan Winship dwinship at redhat.com
Tue May 19 17:34:46 UTC 2009


Milos Jakubicek wrote:
> Please turn this discussion back to two questions:
> 
> 1) What should be the page name?

So just in case this can of worms isn't big enough already, it might be
worth changing it to be a more generic "political arguments we don't
want to get involved in" policy.

Specifically, geolocation seems to be the free software buzzword for
2009, and there are a bunch of Summer of Code projects in GNOME and
elsewhere involving location and mapping. Maps pose a similar set of
problems to flags; eg, if you ship a map claiming that Northern Cyprus
is a separate territory from Cyprus then Greece gets pissed off, and if
you ship a map saying that it isn't, then Turkey gets pissed off. (As I
understand it, the Cypriots themselves mostly just wish that Greece and
Turkey would piss off.) And even if you only use maps that don't
indicate political boundaries, there are still disputes over the names
of certain international geographical features (such as whether the body
of water separating Iran from Saudi Arabia is "the Persian Gulf" or "the
Arabian Gulf").

All the free-software map stuff I've seen uses openstreetmap.org,
meaning (a) we probably wouldn't actually be *shipping* maps, just
providing the ability to cause them to be downloaded (which may or may
not matter to us), and (b) we might be able to say "OpenStreetMap is
aware of these issues and is trying to work through them in a reasonable
manner (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Disputes) so we defer to
them" (though we still might feel the need to warn users that the
software might, under some circumstances, download maps that offend them).

-- Dan




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