KDE RedHat project

[Alan Cox]

On Mon, Aug 22, 2005 at 01:59:32PM -0500, Steve Bergman wrote:
> should be considered "not responsible".  After all, OSS code distributed 
> by RedHat currently could no doubt be modified to do illegal things.  On 

It undoubtedly is by some people just like any other tool. As to DRM question
I don't know. From a philosophical point of view its taking away freedoms,
but it also has the advantage of making people walk into legal walls they
otherwise can't see and thus more aware of the restrictions on them.

Right now Fedora is one size fits most jurisdictions. It isn't just US laws
that have to be considered. Germany for example has strong rules on 
'games that glorify war' (ie violent games). That is one reason bzflag was
pushed out to extras. 

The challenge is to find the right balance between respecting values and
rules globally (so people can use Fedora freely all over the world) and 
not turning into Farenheit 451.

> the other hand, there is at least one wireless driver that Andrew can't 
> include in the vanilla kernel because the souce could be modified by the 
> user to violate FCC regulations.

Its not included (atheros) because the radio end is binary only. Nothing
to my understanding stops it being included if open, but the FCC requires
the original hardware vendor makes such devices tamperproof and the vendor
interpreted this as "not open source". I believe the BSD folks are very
close to shipping a reliable reverse engineered pure open source atheros
driver.

There are a variety of solutions to the problem even for chip vendors (one
is providing wireless settings that are signed so the chip only takes
vendor provided sets. 

Alan