Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions

> As a community, we have to make decisions like this; it's good to expose them widely and think them through.

I think that the reason why this article made me react is that this is a sensitive issue as it can easily make Okular look bad ("boo DRM-enforcers"), I can imagine how Okular developers feel reading your article (by the way see Albert's and Aaron's blog posts currently on PlanetKDE) as it makes them look like they try to help DRM enforcement -- a very unenviable position for a FOSS developer.

My point, I think, is that linux distros usually depart massively from the default configuration as far as KDE is concerned (not even mentioning that they often use many custom patches against KDE), so I don't see why this should be an exception in this case -- in other words: this is mostly an issue for linux distros rather than for the end-user.

> But, do me a favor: look at the screenshot and tell me how an average user will know that this option exists?

I do agree that it would be an improvement if the message there had a button to open the relevant configuration dialog to disable DRM.

But I think that any user who knows what FLOSS is, will guess by himself that there must be a configuration option for this, hence will open the configuration dialog and will find the relevant checkbox right away.

The other users, who don't understand what FLOSS is, probably use standard packages from their distro with the distro's default config choices, and it is then, as said above, entirely up to the distro: the default choice made by Okular developers hardly matters there, as distros very frequently override KDE's own defaults.

> Should we extend cp to make it refuse to copy such files? I hope you would say "no." So there's a line to be drawn somewhere. How do we decide where that line is?

I never said that any program, either okular or cp or any other program, "should" honor DRM restrictions. I only ever disputed the idea that it was bad that okular defaulted to.

I didn't say either that it was a good thing that okular does; i only said that it isn't a bad thing. In other words: it's pretty much irrelevant as it's the distro or sysadmin who should decide; and in the worst case the configuration dialog makes it easy to toggle. I agree that it would be a nightmare if every program required one(either user or distro) to change that setting separately, so ideally there should be a way to set that once and for all with a global setting that all applications would then honor.

But of course there is no way that it would make sense of "cp" to honor that, "cp" is just a lowlevel filesystem operation and by definition only honors filesystem-level permissions.