On Fri, Sep 9, 2011 at 12:29 PM, Lars Müller <lmuelle@suse.de> wrote:
On Fri, Sep 09, 2011 at 11:59:40AM +0200, Sascha Peilicke wrote:
+The SWORD Project is an effort to create an ever expanding software package for +research and study of God and His Word.
Maybe best if one of our English native speakers commnets on this.
As a native English speaker, I do think this is a problem. There are three possible areas of controversy and offence here. Two are easy to change. one is not. 1. "study of God" means that the Christian god is the one and only true god. This is the same as saying all other religions are false. Obviously members of other religions would be justified in taking offense at such a statement. 2. "His Word" means that the Bible is the word of God. This has the same problem as the previous, it is saying that the Christian bible is the legitimate word of god, and by extension that others are wrong. 3. The name "sword" has a violent and aggressive connotation, usually associated with more extreme and evangelical brands of Christianity. I am not longer Christian myself, but when I was a Christian I found the name off-putting. So the name might not only be a problem for non-Christians, but for certain types of Christians as well. However, I think this is a much smaller issue than the description, and is probably not worth making a big deal over. 1 and 2 are easy to fix by simply changing the description to something like: "The SWORD Project is an effort to create an ever expanding software package for research and study of the Christian bible and theology." I think that would be neutral and acceptable to me. As an atheist I have no problem with having religous software, the issue is when the openSUSE project has the appearance of endorsing particular religious views or denigrating others. The current description has this appearance, but that is easy to fix. The name is more difficult to fix but in my opinion is not is not a serious enough issue to warrant any action. However, people who have had problems with evangelical Christians in the past, or cultures that have had problems with violence by Christians in the past, may have a more serious issue with the name. So my personal vote would be to change the description to something that does not imply a judgement on the validity of any religious beliefs, while keeping the package. There used to be one or more Muslim prayer plasma widgets offered by KDE:Extra. They don't appear to be there any more. I think the rules should at least be consistent, so if they were removed based on their religious content then Christian software should also not be allowed. On the other hand if they were removed because of a lack of a maintainer or lack of upstream updates then it is irrelevant to the current issue. -Todd -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org