Fedora Internationalization: Hacked by Chinese?

Jeff Spaleta jspaleta at gmail.com
Thu Aug 4 11:21:15 UTC 2005


On 8/3/05, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> A friend of mine directed me to a recent blog entry of his:
> http://iblog.chomped.org/index.php?p=108
> 
> Fedora ships with the flags removed from the KDE keyboard mapping
> selector. This causes a practical issue for users that switch between
> US and US/international bindings which could be resolved in some way
> other than the flags.
> 
> What I find interesting is that his bugzilla entry for the issue
> (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=164705) was
> closed as a duplicate of a bug which is not publicly available
> (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=70235).
> 
> It appears, from Ian's blog entry, that the flags were removed as a
> result of pressure from the Chinese government because the included
> flag set included a Taiwanese flag. I can't confirm this because I
> can't actually see that bug.

70235 is a really really old bug... it definitely pre-dates fedora.  I
bet if you try hard enough and look back through the archives for
redhat-list  or redhat-beta-list I bet you can find a smattering of
discussion around the time that change was introduced.. like 3 years
ago.
The decision was made in the context of rhl and rhel when fedora
wasn't even a glimmer in anyone's beer yet. So how about you look at
the decision to pull the flags and the decision to make the bug report
private in the correct context for the timeframe when those original
decisions were made...before this was a community project.  Fedora
isn't completely new, and has inherited decisions.  Whether or not its
worthy bringing this specific decision backup for discussion and
review in the context of Fedora is an open question. But I will say
that I find the original blog entry and this post a little bit
over-the-top with reference to the impact this decision is going to
have on larger issues concerning human rights and I'm not sure it's
going to be productive conversation with such grandiose scope being
encouraged by one of the protagonists.

-jef"3 years ago....."spaleta




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