The world is a messy, complicated place. This is not the first or the last time we'll be faced with conflict over various types of recognition. In my time with the project, we've faced calls to remove and disavow entire localizations, such as Macedonian and Kurdish, on similar political/nationalist grounds. In general, we should steer clear of politics outside of issues clearly tied to the Mozilla mission. To me, that means we should be permissive, not prescriptive. To do otherwise feels unnecessarily exclusionary.
Like Tim, I don't believe it makes sense to rely exclusively on ISO-3166. All lists have inherent bias, and as a result crisp compliance with a standard will inevitably be out of date (South Sudan) or create unnecessary tension (i.e. Kosovo is neither Albanian or Serbian). We gain nothing by passing the buck, and risk alienating members of our community in the process. I really like the FreeBSD policy, which aims to avoid sovereignty arguments. http://www.freebsd.org/internal/i18n.html > When listing countries or other geographic areas in documentation, menus, mirror/FTP lists, or other contexts, it is important to introduce such lists as "Countries or Regions" so that an implied sovereignty claim is neither made nor denied to those regions which have their own top level domains. > The ISO 3166 country codes do not necessarily refer to nation-states (e.g. Hong Kong) and should not be treated as such. Likewise the "official" ISO 3166 short English names for those countries and regions which have top level domains are in some cases controversial, and not all of them are commonly used in the software industry. > We follow the guidelines used by IBM, Microsoft, Google, and other prominent software companies in their documentation in that Taiwan should never be included with a distinction referring to the Republic of China, People's Republic of China, or a national flag. Interpretation of the word "Taiwan" is in the eye of the beholder, and The FreeBSD Project does not endorse any particular position. Robert's idea to share from Mozillians is a smart idea, and we should really do that. It won't change the core question (how to resolve this sort of territory question) so I think it's still a valid discussion, which is why adopting a policy like FreeBSD's is appealling. -- Mike On 13 May 2015 at 16:23, Adam Roach <[email protected]> wrote: > On 5/13/15 15:06, Fred Wenzel wrote: > > The comparison to other regions that Adam made are not helpful because >> they tend to not have as wide an acceptance, if any at all. >> > > You're highlighting the exact danger that I'm warning about: creating our > own subjective guidelines around how much recognition is "enough" is > exactly the kind of evaluation that Mozilla ill-equipped to make. > > > If we defer to a third party entity, which we probably should, there's a >> question which. Our choice of ISO 3166 has left many unhappy because it >> pivots on UN membership. For the same reason, the US government issues the >> GENC standard which is a superset of ISO 3166. >> > > If we were a US-only project with a US-focused mission, I would agree that > FIPS/GENC would make sense. > > However, given the worldwide nature of the project, I'd argue that it > makes much more sense to use a list determined by a multilateral group of > worldwide entities rather than a unilateral declaration published by a > single country. > > > -- > Adam Roach > Principal Platform Engineer > [email protected] > +1 650 903 0800 x863 > _______________________________________________ > governance mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance > _______________________________________________ governance mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
