Re: inappropriate racist and other offensive material
On Wed, Mar 13, 2002 at 11:29:45PM +0000, Alan James wrote:
> Any package maintainer should be responsible enough to remove any material
> from a package that its users, or those exposed to it, found offensive.
I heartily disagree with this statement. It leads to censorship
through taking offense, a most insiduous practice. Some people are
just better at taking offense than others; why should they determine
the limits of public speech?
> In the case of BitchX (and I'm asuming it's BitchX we're talking about here,
> I missed some of this thread)
It's not bitchx. Please read the logs for the bugreport that spawned
this thread. One thing you will notice is that the statement in question
is _already_ removed from the package, so we're just talking about general
policy here.
> Do debian developers not have a duty to honor the wishes of Our Users and
> Free Software ? Is it not a reasonable request that this statement be
> removed from the debian release of BitchX ?
Well, this User of Free Software wishes for free and unfettered public
discourse. This User certainly doesn't wish for developers to feel
they have a duty to remove any bits of their packages that someone
objects to.
Richard Braakman
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