Re: [bmc@it.larc.nasa.gov: Proposal]
I agree with your sentiments that sending maintainers to jail = bad juju.
It is my feeling that by asking maintainers to label their packages
appropriately, even as a suggestion to end users with appropriate disclaimers as
to the non-lawyerness of the maintainer, is simply asking for legal hassles for
the maintainers. Once a maintainer has made any statement about the legality of
a package in a given country, some bonehead will try to sue him as a responsible
party when someone installs his package, unwittingly breaking some hitherto
unknown law.
Unfortunately, the current scheme does what it's supposed to do: protect the
mirror operators. The US is probably one of the few countries with the spare
time and spare change (mostly mine, I think) to chase down folks who encrypt
their email to mom... So seperating out non-us makes sense for the mirror
operators, and imposes no legal responsibiltiy on the maintainers...
Just my $.02...
Clint Guillot
Xenir
Drake Diedrich wrote:
> I don't think we'll be able to build a
> completely reliable permissions database: 200 nations, millions of laws and
> patents, thousands of packages, hundreds of maintainers - even if we
> construct a fairly complete database there will still be errors. I think we
> need to separate issues and concentrate only on the prosecutable ones. We
> don't want maintainers to go to jail (well, *I* don't). After that we don't
> want SPI and our sponsors to go to be sued out of existence. Finally, we
> don't want users to unknowingly transgress some law or patent. Those are my
> priorities anyway.
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