On Wed, 2012-01-18 at 17:04 +0000, Jim Henderson wrote:
On Wed, 18 Jan 2012 09:25:00 -0500, Patrick Shanahan wrote:
* Joop Boonen
[01-18-12 04:03]: On Wed, January 18, 2012 9:51 am, Per Jessen wrote:
Just my opinion - I think openSUSE should stay far away from politics of any kind.
I don't think this is politics, this is about our internet freedom.
I agree that openSUSE supports the SOPA blackout.
+1
Same here.
One thing to consider is the potential impact of a law like PIPA or SOPA (the latter of which is apparently dead for the time being) on those outside the US.
openSUSE and open source is about freedom. As has been pointed out already, the nature of OSS projects is political.
How would we like it if the US government decided to shut down the openSUSE wiki because we link to the Packman repository, which contains code that violates DMCA?
The slippery slope here isn't participation in the blackout. The slippery slope is a large, technologically literate population losing the freedom to participate in an OSS project because they can't access it - and have no recourse to resolve it. No trial, no jury.
The slippery slope is the US government then pushing other companies to adopt SOPA-like legislation or face trade restrictions. Don't think that'll happen? Look at some of the leaked stuff about US efforts to get SOPA-like legislation passed in Spain. I also seem to remember something about a similar law in Canada.
Jim
1+ For the EU they're already planning ACTA witch is pretty much the european counterpart to SOPA. There was an interesting talk at 28C3 [1] at that topic, the europeans among us should watch it. Marcel [1]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upz34kUWysk