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