On 05/18/2009 11:53 AM, Andrea Musuruane wrote: > May I kindly ask what is the reason behind this decision? Or, even > better, can someone update the above wiki page explaining the reason? As the person who drafted the flags policy, let me try to explain the rationale: In January, Roozbeh Pournader posted to fedora-legal-list where he said the following: I recently found that Deluge is using country flags to indicate the location of bittorrent peers. Flags are cute and nice of course (and a mental exercise), but are geopolitical hot spots. Upstream didn't like the concern, calling some people (including me?) "crazy ideologists". But the Fedora maintainer (Peter Gordon) fixed the bug in Rawhide (but we're still shipping flags in F9 and F10): https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=479265 But this is not why I'm writing. I'm writing because during the report, I found that we really don't have any official policy on flags. All I found in the wiki was what I had written myself a while ago, here, which is just based on my own experience as an i18n guy: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Languages #I_wish_to_use_my_country.27s_flag_to_refer_to_my_language But we really need a policy. And I thought this list is the best forum to get it into shape. The history is like this: With RHL 8.0, Red Hat decided to remove the Taiwan/Republic of China flag from KDE because of sensitivities/legal requirements of mainland/People's Rebublic of China. That created some public unease, including people stopping to use RHL because of that. Red Hat went a bit further of course, and removed all national flags in a later version. He raised some specific concerns, it is worth reading his original email: http://www.mail-archive.com/fedora-legal-list@xxxxxxxxxx/msg00206.html At the time, the only policy in place was the informal, unwritten, no flags policy that we inherited from Red Hat Linux. I consulted with Red Hat Legal to codify that into a more formal policy for Fedora to use. Red Hat Legal felt that there was minimal legal risk to including flags, although, by having them, it may prevent Fedora from being available/acceptable in some countries (China being a notable example). Based on his original request (and his repeated reminders), I drafted this policy and submitted it to FESCo for review. I did not tell FESCo that they had to pass this for legal reasons (those sorts of things I'm empowered to simply implement), nor did Red Hat require this. If FESCo decides that they are not concerned about the possible geopolitical controversy or possible international restrictions, there's no skin off my back. I just drafted it upon the request of Fedora Community members. Tom "spot" Callaway, Fedora Legal -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
