Re: No Flags "Policy"

[Jens Bech Madsen <jbm oncable dk>]

On Fri, 2003-11-21 at 16:35, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> Hey,
> 
> So, I get first dibs on this can of worms.
> 
> I strongly believe that we should not ship any national flags in GNOME. It
> will be a huge source of problems. Everyone's seen what happened when Red
> Hat shipped the Taiwanese flag (problems in China) and then removed it (and
> it's easy to understand why Taiwanese users complained). Let's not make the
> same mistakes upstream, and cause problems for all of our distributors.
> 
> The easy solution to these problems (because there are a lot of them) is to
> simply not ship flags at all. This is not controversial or offensive. It is
> not reactionary. It is a simple solution to a problem we can't control.

This sounds like utter bollocks to me. Granted I am not familiar with
Redhat's problems with the Taiwanese flag, but guessing from the
postings in this thread, it sounds like they weren't allow to distribute
Redhat in China because it contains the Taiwanese flag.

I wasn't aware that Gnome is a commercial entity which relies on sales
figures to keep it's stocks rising.

What happens if the United States of America decides that software which
contains the word 'Jeff' can't be used in any official way because it
would against some sort of anti-terrorism law? Would you leave Gnome to
avoid causing problems for Sun and Redhat? Should the changelogs be
edited to suit some political whim?

Yes, it would be sad if Chinese and Taiwanese developers can't use or
develop Gnome. But I think it could easily become a huge problem if you
want to cater to any silly law any country in the world comes up with.

I can't know for sure, but is this suddenly a subject because of the
inclusion of gswitchit? I find flags a very good way to easily
distinguish between keyboard layouts. I can see without looking which
keyboard layout I am currently using because I don't need to read text.
The colours of the flags are recognizable and interpretable without
focusing on them.

If a distributor isn't allowed to ship a flag in a certain location,
they can modify the product to suit their business or not. I don't see
the need to have the base product neutered.


Cheers,
Jens