Hi :) I think that unnecessarily exposing TDF (or people doing work for it) to a risk in a way that could NOT be fix easily & quickly would be really dumb. It is an easily avoidable risk.
The fact that one person is ignorant of the risk (or chooses to ignore it) does not mean the rest of the Steering Committee are. Indeed, there was a meeting that came up with the rough draft of the 2 paragraphs prepared by Florian. There is still no mention of where the responsibility would lay if the perceived risk did happen but as the meeting wrote it, the potential threat should be avoided by using Gnu&Linux if easily possible. With Gnu&Linux screen-shots there is NO risk. It also means the Documentation Team can keep doing what they are already doing = aiming towards professionally consistent documentation. The licensing of Gnu&Linux tends to be copy-left allowing people to copy and adapt anything they like. By contrast the Windows Eula is very restrictive and people in the discussion even highlighted paragraphs that showed that any editing of screen-shots in a way that would make them useful for documentation would be a violation. There was a suggestion earlier in the discussion that if TDF did get clobbered by MS for using screen-shots on their OSes then it could 1. Let MS target individuals that produced the screen-shots or 2. TDF could counter-sue the individuals themselves The post also suggested that TDF should reject any documentation that was produced using non-Windows screen-shots. In the MS vs TomTom case. TomTom were forced to pay substantial damages to MS for saving data. The TomTom devices used what 'everyone' uses for saving data. The hardware was their own, the systems were their own but they used Fat32, or Fat16 file-systems for saving their own data onto their own devices. Fat32, Fat16 or just plain Fat are 'used by everyone' for usb-sticks, memory-cards, sd-cards for cameras, phones, mobile devices, calculators and so on. Apparently we should all pay MS for the privilege of storing our own data on our own systems just in case MS suddenly decides to single us out while ignoring other people's violations. Personally on small external devices i tend to stick with ext2 or i don't even worry about the re-writes issue on older SSd tech, and use ext4. The Fat systems is notoriously flaky and even Ntfs has horrible problems that are neatly avoided in the ancient ext2 so i actually gain a lot by doing so. Occasionally i can't share data on it with insecure systems. Yes, everyone is exposed to a large number of unknown risks of a variety of types but this is a known risk that is easy to avoid. Why ask people to beat their head against a wall when they could just walk around the corner? Regards from Tom :) ________________________________ From: Simon Phipps <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Mon, 8 August, 2011 1:07:20 Subject: Re: [steering-discuss] decision on screenshots My proposal stands :-) :-) On 8 Aug 2011, at 01:04, Tom Davies wrote: > Hi :) > That would completely change the statement. It is the opposite of what > Florian > > wrote. Are we going to reopen discussion about the issue again? > Regards from > Tom :) > > > > > ________________________________ > From: Simon Phipps <[email protected]> > To: [email protected] > Sent: Sun, 7 August, 2011 13:44:24 > Subject: Re: [steering-discuss] decision on screenshots > > >>> The Steering Committee acknowledges that there is a small legal risk >>> involved for screenshots on non-free operating systems, but the risk is >>> deemed low. > > This is too strong. The fact is, every action any project takes is subject to > legal risk. Name one that isn't. All that's happened here is that (for > whatever > > motive) the theoretical risk has been articulated for (a part of) this case. >I'd > > suggest saying: > > > "The Steering Committee feels that the legal risk involved in using > screenshots > > of non-free desktops in documentation is no greater than any other > theoretical > risk facing software projects." > > > S. -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to [email protected] Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/steering-discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
