Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions [LWN.net]

Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions

Posted Jun 11, 2009 10:42 UTC (Thu) by Janne (guest, #40891)
Parent article: Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions

If there's one thing that's cle<r from this discussion, it's this:

If free software-folks stopped nitpicking and complaining about minor
licensing-issues and related topics, free software would utterly dominate
the world by now.

But no, what happens is that time and energy gets wasted on pointless
arguments. Software gets forked and unforked, resources get wasted and
developers have to waste their time listening to users who whine "But I
don't want to invest 10 seconds of my life to changing that setting, I want
you do to it for me!".

And there's one thing that amazes me: Basically this discussion has been
about "I should be able to do whatever I please with the content,
regardless of the wishes of the creator!". Now, assume the person saying
that comment was Steve Ballmer, and the content he was referring to, was
GPL'ed software, everyone would be up in arms. But now that it's US who is
making that claim, everything is apparently a-OK....

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Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions

Posted Jun 16, 2009 14:54 UTC (Tue) by zenaan (subscriber, #3778) [Link]

My right to do as I choose with my computer in my house (not talking about publishing to the Internet here at the moment), is absolute!

This is an "information-age right". It appears there are some humans who believe this right either does not exist, or ought be restricted by some heavy hand of law or government or community. I find that strange, but c'est la vie.

In this case of Okular, this absolute-right-over-my-computer is 'functionally' acknowledged with the badly named and mildly obfuscated "DRM" preference option.

My datapoint: The current default for this option in Debian does not match my understanding of the Debian Social Contract nor my expectations for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution.
The "provide dialog option to disable, on first occurrence" is acceptable to me.
I actually like to know about the expectations and/ or license of a document producer/ document, and would appreciate having some GUI feature(s) which makes this information readily available to me.

My position is: either:
a) the Debian Social Contract must change,
b) the default for Okular "DRM" option in Debian must change, or
c) Okular must be 'enhanced' to provide opt-out on first hit, and/ or other GUI enhancements.

If the Okular devs/ Debian packagers are trying to make a point, they're not doing it in the most elegant way at the moment, emphasizing the utility of this article by Corbet - highlighting that there is in fact an issue.

I heartily agree.

Community introspection is a very important thing. Also highlights that we are indeed a community! Happy joy...