Just want to address this one point: On Sun, Feb 28, 2016 at 1:26 PM, Alexander Neundorf <neund...@kde.org> wrote: > On Sunday, February 28, 2016 09:54:18 Stephen Kelly wrote: >> Alexander Neundorf wrote:
> I think I disagree that freedom (I guess as in Free Software) is really a hard > requirement to achieve personal control. There can be proprietary software > which gives the user full control. > > Alex I used to be rather wobbly about the four freedoms and the importance of licensing, but the more I learn about the issues, and see what fudging around the edges gets for Canonical, for instance. They think they will make progress by waffling, but instead they seem to be sinking. While I want KDE to support freedom, privacy and control very strongly, I think we have to work at the political level as well. Just the other day, Richard Moore was in IRC, talking about working in qtnetwork. He said he split the ssh lib from creator out to a standalone lib and was meaning to write a few toys using that. Then he said, "there are major legal issues to shipping it as a lib though. Crypto is allowed in Creator since it's not re-exported by users of Qt whereas as stuff in the libs are re-exported to users of the apps that are developed. I asked, "why does that make legal issues? Is that crypto illegal in some places?" He said, "Valorie: it creates issues for redistribution of Qt eg. from the USA." He added, "it's also why we can't accept contributions to qtssl from the USA. The lawyers think it is too risky." I had no idea. When I asked if I could quote this, Rich said: "sure, but remember that some of this is simply the legal opinion of the lawyers of the Qt company. It doesn't mean that it's 100% true, it just means that it's considered too risky to Qt to attempt it." I said, of course -- it's not so much the reality or not, but the implications which I want to raise; that we need to stand for privacy very strongly and user-control, all up and down the stack. And I would add, in government policy as well. It's sad that here in the US that we have *Tim Cook of Apple* speaking up for strong encryption and user privacy in the face of demands from our FBI. This issue is crucial, on many levels. Valorie -- http://about.me/valoriez _______________________________________________ kde-community mailing list kde-community@kde.org https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-community