I must be doing something seriously wrong...

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On 05/22/2009 07:36 AM, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Paul Wouters (paul at xelerance.com) said:
>>> 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.
>
> Given what Fedora does with respect to software patents in otherwise
> free software, I think you're wrong here. We *do* make that choice
> and related modifications all the time.
>
That situation is different, though, as Fedora has been told that there 
isn't a choice WRT patents.  The decree of eliminating patents has come 
down from Red Hat legal so unless Fedora has the wherewithal to be 
funded by someone else than Red Hat there is no choice being made here.

Fedora does have a choice WRT flags.  There is a benefit to not shipping 
flags but it isn't a matter of if we do ship flags, Red Hat will no 
longer sponsor us.

>>> 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.
>
> I am not removing any choice from *you*. You are free to reference
> it as you see fit.
>
> In the same way, you're free to have a desktop background that consists
> entirely of naked people, or some derogatory cartoon of religious icons.
> It does not mean *Fedora* is going to ship that way, as such a thing doesn't
> bring real benefits to the project, only demerits.
>
You can't argue this without having a solid proposal to reference.  If 
the proposal you're arguing under is that there's no flags in the 
distribution, then you are removing the choice from people as there's no 
way for maintainers to ship that user interface decision in Fedora, 
there's no way to ship certain packages, and there's no way for users to 
download the packages to optionally install on their systems.  If you're 
arguing versus the current policy, then there's no additional demerits 
in shipping all flags in unmodified packages as we can't ship to China 
anyway so there's additional work for no gain.

People need to reference the pros and cons of specific proposals 
otherwise there's just confusion.

-Toshio