In which country should Fedora be legal?

Patrice Dumas pertusus at free.fr
Wed May 20 08:12:18 UTC 2009


On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 04:33:06PM -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> 
> Too late. We already remove content from various packages where necessary,
> as stated earlier in the thread.

I haven't read the whole thread, so I won't say more on that subject, 
although I am not aware of such packaging guidelines, but I follow
Fedora less closely those days.

> If you're seriously suggesting we set up legal counsel in all countries
> before taking any action, that's not going to happen. Honestly, that
> sounds like intentionally setting the bar ridiculously high just for
> the purpopse of making sure no one could possibly do anything you might
> disagree with.

It is not what I wanted to say, but I agree that my phrasing sounded
like that. I don't think that a full law review should be a prerequisite
for doing an action for a country that Fedora wants to be legal in.

But at least the countries should be chosen (I beleive by the Board) 
and the items that are spotted as illegal in each country should be 
documented and transformed into guidelines. As more items are discoverd, 
they should be added. But I think that we also should be proactive,
that is, once the countries are chosen, ask on mailing lists (the Fedora 
Ambassadors are certainly people that should be contacted) what people
know about laws that can be broken in the different chosen countries
and then have people document it in a wiki. It can be vague at that phase, 
for example, for France there could be 'only some people are entitled to 
deliver medical advice', and, if there is enough concern and evidence,
and, if possible advice from people really knowing the law, then turn it
into guidelines. 

> Given that I'm fairly sure there are zero countries on the planet
> where flags *cannot* be made illegal by some act of the populace
> or government, that's a specious argument.

What's the 'populace'? I am pretty sure that you can display flags 
offendant to France without being illegal in France (though I am not
a lawyer). And in the US, it seems that there is no problem with
the flags.

--
Pat




More information about the fedora-devel-list mailing list