[liberationtech] Fedora project and software "likely to be illegal or unlawful"

[Pranesh Prakash]

Dear Don,
This seems to be a horrible idea.  There is no such thing as 
"objectively speaking".  How would peer-to-peer software be looked at? 
What about surveillance software?  What about circumvention software? 
What about censorship software?  What about patent-infringing software? 
  What is the objective ruling on these?  There is no "objectively 
speaking" answer to any of these.  Everything depends on context.  Many 
times something being done by a private person is perfectly legal 
(blocking of websites, etc.) when the same being done by a public 
authority is illegal.  Other times, the opposite is true.  No 
"objective" ruling is possible.

SQLNinja is about as illegal as Firesheep or Kismet or LAME or TrueCrypt 
in a country with encryption limits.

Regards,
Pranesh

On Wednesday 10 November 2010 07:07 PM, Don Marti wrote:
> The Fedora project has voted to add this to its
> guidelines for software that it's willing to include:
>
>    "Where, objectively speaking, the package has
>    essentially no useful foreseeable purposes other
>    than those that are highly likely to be illegal
>    or unlawful in one or more major jurisdictions
>    in which Fedora is distributed or used, such that
>    distributors of Fedora will face heightened legal
>    risk if Fedora were to include the package, then
>    the Fedora Project Board has discretion to deny
>    inclusion of the package for that reason alone."
>
> http://lwn.net/Articles/414438/
>
> Of course, this could be interpreted to include
> circumvention software.  But is it even possible
> to have policies that say it's OK to distribute
> something that's illegal in "the people's republic
> of unfreedonia" but not distribute something that's
> illegal in the USA?
>

-- 
Pranesh Prakash
Programme Manager
Centre for Internet and Society
W: http://cis-india.org | T: +91 80 40926283

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