Package Maintainers Flags policy

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2009-05-19 at 18:58 -0700, Christopher Stone wrote:
> On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 6:59 AM, Seth Vidal <skvidal at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> > What if a non-authoritarian regime didn't want us to distribute a flag that
> > was offensive to their democratically-empowered populace? Would that be okay
> > then?
> 
> Please Seth, a non-authoritarian regime wouldn't be making demands on
> what you can distribute, if they did, they would be authoritarian.

Germany has fairly strong (democratically imposed) restrictions on
freedom of speech as it relates to the Nazi regime and the Holocaust. If
Fedora were to include some software which impinged on those
restrictions in some way, it wouldn't be legal to distribute it in
Germany. It's perfectly possible to envisage a situation in which a
piece of software would be non-distributable in Germany, a country few
would describe as an 'authoritarian regime'.

(In fact, it's happened. The game Wolfenstein 3-D had to be
substantially modified for distribution in Germany.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfenstein_3D#Controversy )
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net