A General Resolution? [was: Standard Compliance in Country Names]

[Anton Zinoviev <anton@lml.bas.bg>]

On 15.IV.2004 at 08:08 (+0200) Christian Perrier wrote:
> 
> However, I take this occasion to highlight something which seems
> misunderstood here : I, myself, Christian Perrier, am absolutely NOT
> in position of changing anything on my own decision.

Then probably we can use a General Resolution?  The following could be
my proposal.

-------------------------------
Debian General Resolution

Resolved:

A. That Debian will be politically independent and will not take
political decisions or decisions based on political considerations.

B. That the lists of the languages and the countries of the installer
will include any name that finds one or more Debian developers willing
to vouch for its legitimacy and willing to maintain support for it.

------ end of Resolution ------

Rationale:

1. We should take a similar approach as we do to package management.
   If we have developer(s) willing to vouch for legitimacy of a
   locale, and willing to maintain support for it, we should include
   it.  It says a lot about Debian success that we've come as far as
   we have -- we're a long way from worrying about fortunes-off and
   the Purity Test.

2. To censure the name of an entire country/language and in doing so
   isolate them appears to be anti-thesis of free software.  It is
   discrimination against the referenced people and goes against the
   spirit of DFSG ("5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups").

3. The names of the countries and languages should be accepted by the
   referenced party.  Calling a person with a name unacceptable by
   this person is offence.

4. ISO 3166 is not politically independent standard.  Moreover it has
   alternatives, for example the International Components for Unicode
   (packaged in icu-data) and the the names used by National
   Geographical Society.  If Debian decides to follow any one of these
   standards it is taking thereby a political decision.

5. The GNU locales contain in themselves information about their
   language and territory.  This information is written by the
   creator/maintainer of the locale and doesn't follow any presumably
   "independent" standard.

6. KDE has taken similar approach.  "If somebody goes through the
   trouble of creating a KDE website, then we will include it in this
   list. Furthermore, we will not override the site creator's
   preference for what to call their geographical area (e.g., calling
   the Taiwan site "Taiwan" instead of "China")."

Anton Zinoviev

P.S. Much of this proposal is taken from messages by other people.  I
     apologise for the lack of proper attributions.