I must be doing something seriously wrong...

Paul Wouters paul at xelerance.com
Fri May 22 01:57:43 UTC 2009


On Thu, 21 May 2009, Bill Nottingham wrote:

> As I said, it's a trade-off between:
>
> Benefits:
> - allows roughly 1/6 of the world's population to use Fedora freely

Fedora is already allowed to be used freely. If your country does not
allow you to use free software, that's a problem out of scope of Fedora.

> I feel the benefits in this case outweigh the demerits, and the

The benefits takes away my freedoms of referencing a country my flag and
image that my own country recognises.

> amount of work required to be greatly exaggerated.

Because a 3 second check already spotted non-flag issue?s Should these
go to:

/usr/lib64/openoffice.org/basis3.1/share/template/wizard/bitmap/taiwan.gif
/usr/share/texmf/omega/otp/otibet/tibadjusttsheg.otp
/usr/lib64/pango/1.6.0/modules/pango-tibetan-fc.so

Today flags. tomorrow geography? Next week a language? Next year a culture?

> making Fedora available for all to use freely is a fundamental
> goal of the project;

You cannot give Chinese people the freedom to see flags. Only China can.

If you want to free them, show them freedom, don't take freedom away from us.

> Now, if we can discuss the benefits and demerits without resorting
> to reducuing it to 'aah! slippery slope' or 'I'm offended by
> yellow, take that out too!', it would help, as those are sort
> of missing the point.

Those are not missing the point though. Would you have banned a game
that included an (illegal) photo of a coffin of a dead US soldier, when
that was illegal in the Bush regime too?

What about marihuana leaves (legal where I come from)? Or some chemistry
software that displaces a cocaine molecule? Or the above references of
a piece of the earth called Taiwan? How about navigation software that
tells you how to go to Cuba from Florida? A chemistry book that tells
you how to make gun powder? What if Taiwan goes DNSSEC and I want to
add the DNSKEY to the dnssec-conf package? Should 10/10th of the world
not have DNSSEC protection to save 1/6th of the world from not having
Fedora?

Russians officially are not allowed to use RSA and should use GOST, are
you going to exclude that too to help them, as the US does not ban use of
GOST so clearly using GOST would have the benefit of 1/10 of the population
of this planet to use Fedora?

The whole point is about a slippery slope, and the only way out is not
to play.

Fedora is already free. It does not need to be more free. If people need
to make changes, because their government puts additional restrictions
on top of international rule, then let the Newspeak Department of said
country respin the free software themselves into a Fedora NewSpeak.

Paul




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