Dear Fedora Community, what do you want?

[Rodolfo J. Paiz]

At 06:19 6/4/2004, Rui Miguel Seabra wrote:
>You are aware of a little thing called copyright law, and laws recently
>approved in the EU that allow one to see his house raided by private
>police without a warrant on alledged violations of copyright, right?
>
>If you use only Free Software, you're safe from that. Unless software
>patents come accross, and software patents have to be taken down.

Wrong... assuming those laws are as radical as you say, those laws will 
allow abuses of your human and civil rights *regardless* of which software 
you use. They can raid your house and find only Free Software, but your 
house was still raided! The problem of which you speak is not born of which 
software you use but which laws your country passes.

While I agree that Open Source and Free Software are preferable, your 
argument is flawed and you are assuming a cause/effect relationship where 
there is none. Free or proprietary software has nothing to do with abusive 
laws of search and seizure. Besides, such a law as you describe would be 
entirely inconstitutional in the United States, and I find it hard to 
believe that such a law really exists in Europe either. In either case, the 
law is the problem... anything else is inference or extrapolation.

Cheers,


-- 
Rodolfo J. Paiz
rpaiz at simpaticus.com
http://www.simpaticus.com