13 January 2012

Fedora and SOPA

USA Congress is going to debate and, as the current signs say, approve SOPA and Internet censorship on January 24. Trying to prevent this, a number of online entities are planning an awareness campaign on January 18, ranging from entire blackout of websites (to show the public the expected effects of the law) to mere informational banners and interstitials.

Would Fedora join them? I have little faith it will happen, but we are going to be affected, the project is USA based and was affected in the past (look at multimedia support, audio and video codecs as an example), the main sponsor is also an USA corporation. As a community Fedora is relying user-generated content, and SOPA will block user-generated content, imagine a Fedora with no wiki, no planet blog aggregator, no web archived mailing lists, not even Bugzilla or Koji. Would that be of any use for you? (and don't imagine the project won't be affected, it won't move servers outside USA, it won't change sponsors, it will obey the USA law).

How about other FOSS projects, we are all pretty much in the same boat?

From my party, my own blogs will turn black on January 18.

4 comments:

  1. So will sixgun.org - we'll be on strike!

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  2. i am still researching how i can easily turn black (and restore the next day) a Blogger.com blog

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  3. http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/204167-sopa-shelved-until-consensus-is-found

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  4. until next time when is discussed, as it happens in Europe with software patents, they try again and again

    ReplyDelete