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Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions

Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions

Posted Jun 16, 2009 14:54 UTC (Tue) by zenaan (subscriber, #3778)
In reply to: Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions by Janne
Parent article: Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions

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...


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