[kde-community] finding a clear vision for KDE - second draft for discussion

[Valorie Zimmerman]

Just want to address this one point:

On Sun, Feb 28, 2016 at 1:26 PM, Alexander Neundorf <neundorf at kde.org> wrote:
> On Sunday, February 28, 2016 09:54:18 Stephen Kelly wrote:
>> Alexander Neundorf wrote:

> I think I disagree that freedom (I guess as in Free Software) is really a hard
> requirement to achieve personal control. There can be proprietary software
> which gives the user full control.
>
> Alex

I used to be rather wobbly about the four freedoms and the importance
of licensing, but the more I learn about the issues, and see what
fudging around the edges gets for Canonical, for instance. They think
they will make progress by waffling, but instead they seem to be
sinking.

While I want KDE to support freedom, privacy and control very
strongly, I think we have to work at the political level as well.

Just the other day, Richard Moore was in IRC, talking about working in
qtnetwork. He said he split the ssh lib from creator out to a
standalone lib and was meaning to write a few toys using that. Then he
said, "there are major legal issues to shipping it as a lib though.
Crypto is allowed in Creator since it's not re-exported by users of Qt
whereas as stuff in the libs are re-exported to users of the apps that
are developed.

I asked, "why does that make legal issues? Is that crypto illegal in
some places?" He said, "Valorie: it creates issues for redistribution
of Qt eg. from the USA." He added, "it's also why we can't accept
contributions to qtssl from the USA. The lawyers think it is too
risky." I had no idea.

When I asked if I could quote this, Rich said:  "sure, but remember
that some of this is simply the legal opinion of the lawyers of the Qt
company. It doesn't mean that it's 100% true, it just means that it's
considered too risky to Qt to attempt it."

I said, of course -- it's not so much the reality or not, but the
implications which I want to raise; that we need to stand for privacy
very strongly and user-control, all up and down the stack. And I would
add, in government policy as well. It's sad that here in the US that
we have *Tim Cook of Apple* speaking up for strong encryption and user
privacy in the face of demands from our FBI.

This issue is crucial, on many levels.

Valorie

-- 
http://about.me/valoriez