Anarchism FAQ?! WTF?...

[Matthew East]

On Fri, February 9, 2007 3:28 pm, Daniel Pittman wrote:
> "Michael T. Richter" <ttmrichter at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> What is a political screed on anarchism doing in the Ubuntu
>> repositories?
>
> Someone packaged it, in Debian, and it became part of Ubuntu (universe)
> as a result of the routine sync between the two distributions.
>
>> Would similar packages for, say, communism, national socialism,
>> Objectivist capitalism, libertarianism, etc. be accepted?
>
> Yes.
>
> Seriously, what did you think the answer was going to be?
>
>
> The problem with freedom -- and much of the free software movement, of
> which Ubuntu is a part, is about freedom -- is that people publish ideas
> that disagree with you.
>
> It may seem odd but, at the end of the day, as long as the content
> adheres to the rules of Debian and Ubuntu there is no reason for it to
> be excluded.

Actually, personally I can't help but feel that this attitude can be
dangerous when we are talking about pure written material, as opposed to
programs. For instance, there may be problems where the reliability of the
material included is at risk.

If there is *no* analysis at all of material in the repository, then it
will be a race to include your point of view, and that race will be won by
the people with most packagers on their team!

A different solution might be just to take a view about the reliability of
a particularly comprehensive resource, like wikipedia, and ship that.

If a particular package has a maintainer who is willing to accept bug
reports on the reliability of the material, then that's a different
matter.

Matt
-- 
http://www.mdke.org
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