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Okular is doing the right thing.mostly.Okular is doing the right thing.mostly.Posted Jun 3, 2009 13:23 UTC (Wed) by sepreece (subscriber, #19270)In reply to: Okular is doing the right thing. NOT. by GreyWizard Parent article: Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions
Sorry, the "Again" was ill-chosen, I was reemphasizing someone else's point, not my own, and should have expressed that more clearly.
You did correctly state one implication of my point. The complete point was that the essence of free software is that software creators can scratch their itch in whatever way they please and if downstream re-distributors and users don't like it, they're free to change it. That does imply that default settings are arbitrary, at the will of their creator.
Since neither of has any evidence as to the distribution of opinions across the user base, your estimate of a "tiny minority" has as good a chance of being right as any other. My own guess is that most users would be comfortable with supporting the flag by default if the warning behavior was changed to allow an override action as part of the dialog and to provide a better message (without the misleading word "DRM" - a simple statement that the author has disabled copying text from the document). I, for one, DO appreciate knowing when I'm breaking the author's expressed rules for using the document.
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Okular is doing the right thing.mostly. Posted Jun 4, 2009 5:49 UTC (Thu) by GreyWizard (guest, #1026) [Link] That does imply that default settings are arbitrary, at the will of their creator. No, it most certainly does not. Free software is not incompatible with striving for excellence. That means attempting to make the best decisions possible at every level, including making the defaults sensible for as many users as possible. Since neither of has any evidence as to the distribution of opinions across the user base, There is plenty of evidence on my side. But I don't care to present it because your challenge is not an intellectually honest one. You could apply this pattern to any statement, no matter how reasonable or self-evident. Do you have evidence that there is more light during the day than at night? Have you actually collected time series data of light measurements? Are you sure your instruments are calibrated properly? And so on. Would you waste time trying to convince me of the obvious? I hope not. Therefore if you insist that there might be more users who prefer to be constrained by PDF flags than not we will have to agree to disagree. I, for one, DO appreciate knowing when I'm breaking the author's expressed rules for using the document. Wanting to know the author's preference is not the same as wanting to be constrained by it.
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