On Mon, Mar 10, 2003 at 05:59:19PM -0500, David Turner wrote:
> On Sun, 2003-03-09 at 18:18, Anthony Towns wrote:
> > In the dissident case, we're trying to protect the people from having to
> > reveal their changes to the government they're protesting. But this just
> > doesn't make any real sense: the code they're hacking on is the least of
> > their worries - it's the contents of their databases, not their bugfix to
> > select query processing that they need to keep private; and furthermore
> What about DeCSS?
What about it? Nobody was trying to keep DeCSS private. Nobody's trying
to keep quiet the existance of steganographic of cryptographic software
that might help reporters send out articles that haven't been edited or
censored by the Palestinian Authority. Some people might be trying to
keep the fact that _they_ use it quiet, but that's a different matter.
> > it's the government's laws that will put them most at risk here -- of
> > being accused of spying, eg -- not the copyright license. So from what
> > I can see, we're protecting something of little value, and then doing
> > a bad job of it.
> But in order that users may evade the government's laws,
Uh, Debian's not here to help people evade their government's laws.
> For instance, consider a binary which is a game, unless it's called with
> the --dissident command-line option, in which case, it's DeCSS (or
> GPG). Were the source code to this game revealed, it would show clearly
> the nature of the program. But the gov't doesn't have time to reverse
> engineer the binaries (and anyway, DMCA2 prohibits it). They do have
> the time, however, to follow up on GPL (3)(b) offers. Can dissidents
> distribute binaries to everyone, and source code only to those they
> trust? Not according to many Free Software licenses.
>
> And I think the Dissident test as it now stands is clear on the above.
> It's not dispositive on every issue, as the debate shows.
I have no idea what you're trying to say here.
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
``Dear Anthony Towns: [...] Congratulations --
you are now certified as a Red Hat Certified Engineer!''
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