On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 04:43, Bryen M. Yunashko
In the spirit of openness, I will state that my preliminary (and I emphasize "preliminary") is that such a statement is reprehensible. It is something that I would never utter, and it is something that I agree has no place in a forum such as ours. I have personally experienced persecution at the hands of another religion in my childhood years and therefore it is very personal to me when I see someone attacking a relgion, whether it is my religion or someone else's religion.
But we must tread carefully to address the question of where is the line drawn. Many of us express opinions about life in general in our signature tags. And many of those opinions expressed are fairly harmless and are not interpreted as offensive in any way. But at what point does it cross the line? Some, like this one, are very clear, and others are not so clear, and subject to interpretation.
Regulating taglines in such a way is not going to be as easy as one might think and I want to see us come to a decision that is not viewed as censorship but also ensures the safe and positive collaboration of all participants in this project, across religious, political, cultural, racial and gender divides. That is what we, the Board, will have to address.
Quite the proverbial slippery slope you're all teetering on here. What about people who insist on posting scripture from the Christian Bible as a signature in all their emails? I've seen cases of that here on the oS mailing list over the years.. .including posts from people who find such scripture offensive and are asking the originator not to post scripture... they are of course usually ignored, and the scripture is still used. Do you say no signature tags at all? If you strip signature tags, what about legal liability? Some companies insist on that multi paragraph "if you read this email and it isn't for you, delete it now or else" statement to protect themselves from lawyers whose sole purpose in life is litigation against companies who don't have that signature in all emails sent from their company email server. Do you state that there should be no signatures that offend Islam? What about ones that I've seen that are against the Jewish occupation of Palestine? Are those OK? What about if someone uses quotes from the Dali Lama? Do we allow that despite the fact that the Chinese government gets rather hot and bothered about that man? If someone has their email configured to pull a random quote from fortune, will they be required to sanitize it before clicking send? fortune has some quotes that someone somewhere will probably find offensive. Do you see the point here? This is one of those damned if you do, damned if you don't situations. I don't envy the decision that's been forced upon the Board here... you cannot make the right decision. No matter what the decision is, you'll be wrong in someone's eyes. Censorship of any form is one of those things that is virtually impossible to get right. C. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org