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Re: Obscene content in cygwin file.




There is also the issue of legal risk. Is the material illegal in any country (which would cause obvious difficulty for any user or maintainer in such countries) and do any of these countries apply their laws extra territorially (which might cause problems to anyone visiting a country with an extradition agreement with the offended country). If there is a legal risk, is the continued inclusion of the material, which is rather peripheral to the main purpose of Cygwin, justified?


Mark Thornton


Interesting point, however it does appear to be rhetorical since no one has in fact brought this up as an issue for them. My apologies if I missed a post were someone said this was their issue. Nevertheless, for entertainment value and in the interest of completeness let's evaluate this issue as well.

First to clearly state the question. It appears to me to be: Should a software author or packager take on the responsibility of no breaking the laws of other countries where the software may be distributed.

If among the goals of the packager he wishes to cause no harm to his users perhaps it is a good idea to remove the software.

Will removing the software reduce the risk to the user? Almost any content is widely available on the net, so our efforts to protect the user may be limited. Further, are we sure that this is the only package that is not legal in a given country. If their are others then we would need to remove them as well to insure that we've successfully removed the additional risk our software puts on it's users.

It seems on the face of it that insuring the legality of the software in every legal system is a responsibility poorly placed on the packager. A far better judge of the legality of a given software package is the user. That user only has to evaluate his own laws wear as the packager must evaluate every countries laws.

If the user is to take responsibility then we must provide as much information as possible for every package so that the user can apply his own judgment. This handily addresses the other issue of personal objection to the content as well.


j


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