Fortune Program -Moving->RE: Wanda is broken

[Mike A. Harris]

Senthil_OR at Dell.com wrote:
>>-----Original Message-----
>>Patrick Barnes
>>It is highly unlikely that fortune will make it back in to 
>>Core with its current quotes. If we had an assortment of packages of
> 
> quotes 
> 
>>available,
>>then one which contains no controversial quotes could be 
>>included 
> 
> 
> So it all boils down to uncontroversial quotes.
> My suggestion:
> fortune-mod package + Fedora Tips package (To be created if not already
> present).
> By this way, Fedora can end up shipping fortune program,make the wanda
> fish and the user happy.

fortune-mod wasn't removed from Red Hat Linux because of controversial
quotes alone, but rather for a variety of reasons.  One of the main
reasons, was indeed related to the included quotes.  Here are some of
the quote related reasons:

- offensive quotes
- racial slurs
- misquotes (random people in the community being misquoted out of
   context)
- quotes from literary works which may be affected by copyright law

There is no easy way to know if any particular quote being
attributed to someone is actually something they said, or something
they would be offended or upset about if they knew they were being
quoted in a database of quotes in operating systems spread around
the world.

Over time we have received requests from people to remove various
quotes for all of the above reasons, including misquotes and
people bringing up things which might have copyright issues.

fortune-mod is a pretty basic and simple program, and you would think
that it would be something you could throw into an operating system
and leave it there forever, without ever needing to look at the code,
or patch the package ever again.  While that's mostly true on the
code side of things, endlessly patching the quote database to
remove various quotes, and potentially having copyright and/or other
legal issues to contend with in the future perhaps from the remaining
quotes is not something worth the legal trouble nor developer man
hours to update the package everytime someone complains about a
quote of some sort being in a "professional" OS.

While Fedora Core is a hobbyest/enthusiast OS, one could certainly
argue to "lighten up" about controversial issues, and for that part
I would probably tend to agree.  Ignoring potential legal issues
however would be something unwise.

One could suggest that we include the application itself, but remove
the default databases and construct our own from scratch.  That was
of course considered initially, but it doesn't give a lot of bang
for the buck for any effort expended to do so.  I'm sure most users
would rather Red Hat developers spend their time fixing the kernel,
X, glibc, and developing new technology than wasting their time
constructing "legally approved" fortune-mod databases.  ;o)

I think fortune-mod is best being something you download off freshrpms
or some other non-Red Hat web/ftp site.  That way it can be distributed
as-is, and people who like it as-is can get it unmodified in all
of it's insulting copyright infringing obscene offensive glory, and
bank managers wont end up seeing it show offensive messages to their
customers or personel.  ;o)

One thing I *do* find incredibly impressive however, is just how
emotional people get about the inclusion of or lack thereof of
the fortune-mod program in our OS.  For a completely useless toy
with no real practical use, it sure gets people fired up.

As such, I suspect perhaps I may be pouring gasoline on the fire
perhaps by even responding to the thread.  Oh well, perhaps someone
can summarize some of the best "quotes" from the thread, and add
them to a new fortune-mod database, and include it in the next
upstream version of fortune-mod.   It wont be in our OS anyway,
so pick the juiciest comments.  Think "South Park".

;oP