Suggested policy (was: Re: Apollon soon in kde-extragear)

[Olaf Jan Schmidt]

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[Petter E. Stokke, Do 12.02. 2004 22:25:22]
> I do wish the KDE project as a whole would
> establish a policy on this issue,

I agree that a general policy would be very helpful.

How about this:

"KDE does not host software which promotes illegal usecases in the user 
interface or in the documentation. If a software is likely to be used by 
a great part of its users for illegal purposes, then a number of real, 
legal usecases are shown in the documentation. The default settings 
should be consistent with these examples.

The documentation and the user interface must state that illegal 
activities are not encouraged. If non-partisan websites containing legal 
information for a number of countries are available, the documentation 
should point to them.

If there is disagreement about whether an application complies with this 
policy or about the legal status of certain usecases, KDE will use the 
safe solution and not host the application unless the application 
developers convincingly show that they are willing to address all the 
doubts."


> because one can be sued over very
> nearly everything, and trying to second-guess the patent
> enforcers/music industry/crazy people from Utah

This is not only about law-enforcement in Utah.

Remember that since last year, downloading music from copy-proptected CDs 
is clearly illegal in Germany, where the KDE CVS server are hosted.

Olaf

- -- 
Olaf Jan Schmidt, KDE Accessibility Project
KDEAP co-maintainer, maintainer of http://accessibility.kde.org

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