Okular is doing the right thing.mostly.

Posted Jun 4, 2009 5:49 UTC (Thu) by GreyWizard (guest, #1026)
In reply to: Okular is doing the right thing.mostly. by sepreece
Parent article: Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions

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.