Package Maintainers Flags policy

Adam Williamson awilliam at redhat.com
Wed May 20 21:02:03 UTC 2009


On Wed, 2009-05-20 at 13:52 -0700, Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-05-20 at 20:57 +0200, Patrice Dumas wrote:
> > What does that exactly mean? Are the Fedora mirrors unreachable from 
> > those countries?
> 
> No, but it would be illegal for the Fedora project to actively try to
> distribute into those countries.  The mirrors are supposed to put up a
> blurb about not downloading if you're in one of those countries, and/or
> blocking IPs from those areas.  It's not easily policable, but it is
> easy to notice the project entering into any kind of business
> arrangement or actively helping to distribute into those countries.

FWIW, the concept of introducing a policy that "we will adjust the
Fedora project and product to enable it to be distributed in China" is a
troubling one. There are other, well-known cases of prominent tech
companies - Yahoo! China is the obvious example - doing very problematic
things to make the Chinese government happy and hence be 'kosher' for
distribution / promotion etc in China. I'm not sure that's a road we
want to start down.

I'm fairly sure that, if it actually happened, Fedora wouldn't do
anything really ethically dubious just to continue being distributable
in China. However, if it came to that, we'd then have wasted all this
effort footling around with flags...

I think we need a broader assessment of the overall implications of such
a policy before jumping in to it.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net




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