KDE RedHat project

Steve Bergman steve at rueb.com
Mon Aug 22 18:59:32 UTC 2005


Alan Cox wrote:

>On Sun, Aug 21, 2005 at 02:07:54PM -0500, Steve Bergman wrote:
>  
>
>Americans have strange ideas about their laws and the extent they cover. 
>Sometimes to good effect (eg corruption laws) sometimes to bad. For a US
>based body to advocate that a non-US citizen exercise their legal rights if
>those rights conflict with "US law" is an area that requires careful legal
>thought. Remember that US "freedom of speech" is political speech - so the
>right to complain about the existing US policies and fight them is protected
>not the right to tell people how to violate them.
>  
>
No argument from me.  So could DRM actually help us, here?  Could 
RedHat/Fedora offer country specific versions with some sort of regional 
DRM in place, so that the rest of the world doesn't have to suffer from 
shortcomings here in the USA?  Of course, with the source being 
available people could subvert it, but surely, at some point, RedHat 
should be considered "not responsible".  After all, OSS code distributed 
by RedHat currently could no doubt be modified to do illegal things.  On 
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.

BTW, nobody has called me on it, but my original post, upon re-reading, 
seems more critical of RedHat than was intended.  Retroactive appologies 
for that.

-Steve




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