[Clipart] OpenClipart and Debian.

[Daniel Carrera]

Jonadab the Unsightly One wrote:

> >> And the German law says that the current ocal distribution is
> >> illegal.
> 
> This is just completely astonishing to me.  Germany?

Your personal opinion on this is not the issue. Germany's opinion is. 
Germany declared the Nazi flag illegal. They have good reasons for their 
decision, which are not pertinent to this discussion (but you can 
imagine). What is pertinent is the flag is (1) illegal in Germany and (2) 
deeply troublesome in many places.


> If we put the keyword "nazi" in its metadata, will that be adequate, or 
> do we need to work out a more elaborate system of 
> remove-for-such-and-such-a-country keywords? "remove-for-germany", perhaps?

I think that country names are a bad idea. Too much effort.

"nazi" sounds good, but I wouldn't advocate doing the same thing every 
time we find anything that is offensive of illegal in one place, simply 
because it might be too much work. Then again, maybe it's no work at all.

I like the idea of separating UN and Olympic flags (which are fairly safe) 
and other flags elsewhere. That's a fairly simple criteria that scales 
whell, an the majority of the issue will be in non-UN non-Olympic flags, 
so it addresses most of the problem. And really, "most" is enough. It's 
okay if we can't do everything, no one is expecting OCAL to be perfect. 
Just make a "reasonable" effort to address the issue.


> It's not that I have any Nazi sympathies (quite the contrary), but the
> flag is in context with a collection of various national, political,
> and historic flags, and I don't think it's right to remove the Nazi
> flag from the collection altogether, for everyone worldwide.

Not what I'm suggesting.


> And I'm not an anti-censorship nut; I recognize as well as anyone the 
> need for reasonable amounts of reasonable kinds of censorship

Good, I like reasonable people. I don't like extremes (either extreme).


> does Germany want us to do, pretend that WWII never happened?

No. And you can find the flag in public libraries for example. But the 
rules under which the flag can be used ad distributed are strict.


> Things that are *widely* considered offensive, such as pornography and
> dead babies, I can see excluding or partitioning off separately into
> an "everything" collection, but things that are only a problem in very
> specific areas or for very specific subpopulations are another matter.

The Nazi flag is a problem is very wide areas (Europe, Israel and the ex 
USSR), just not the US.

Reminder: I didn't suggest complete removal, but putting it in a separate 
collection (e.g. non-UN non-Olympic flags).


-- 
Daniel Carrera            | I know everything, I just can't remember
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