Ubuntu's choice of images

Posted Dec 9, 2004 18:59 UTC (Thu) by etbe (subscriber, #17516) [Link]

Technically it would not be difficult to setup a master server for a
country that contains packages that comply with the laws and customs of
that country. So a Debian server in Iran or China could have a much
smaller list of packages, and a Debian server in the Netherlands could
have even more packages than the server in the US. This has already been
suggested, but some people don't like that idea, they want the US and
Netherlands repositories for Debian to contain the same set of packages
that are considered suitable for an Iranian mirror.

As for SPI incorporation, this problem doesn't seem to apply to
multi-national corporations. I can think of a couple of examples (which
I won't name due to legal reasons) of subsidiaries of US companies in
other countries performing actions that would almost certainly result in
them being successfully sued if the parent company in the US did the same
things. I doubt that Debian in the Netherlands could get SPI in trouble
any more than a subsidiary of a US corporation can get the parent company
in trouble.

A baseless law suit can kill a small company if the attacker has a
significantly larger legal budget than the victim. If Debian could be
destroyed in such a manner then it's quite likely that someone would have
tried it already. However due to it all being free software Debian is
immune to such attacks. The code will always remain free and the
developers will always want to work on it so no matter what happens
Debian will remain.