Hi everybody, Just wanted to make you aware that there has been a very long and heated discussion over the inclusion of SWORD into the official openSUSE repos in the last couple of days. It can be read through here: http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/2011-09/msg00422.html
I did not participate, but it can be summarized as follows: A maintainer had requested for sword to be included into the openSUSE repos (apparently everybody was oblivious to the fact that it was already in the openSUSE Education repo). The discussion went pretty well with the tentative conclusion to make sure that the description is religiously neutral and that sword should otherwise be allowed into the repos. Then, a few ardent atheists started to take over, and arguments comparing the Bible to Nazi literature and about how much they hate all religions were brought fourth. It is obvious that no reasonable discussion can take place with these sorts of arguments. I am just proud of the participating Christians who stayed calm and reasonable for the most part, making the atheists look bad for their own eruptions in the process. Anyways, I think this is pretty much the conclusion they reached - to not censor any package (as in: not allow any religious/political content), but to rather make sure that the description is not offensive to anyone. I'm bringing this up because I am wondering what the SWORD community can do to give a clearer impression of our motives and also to make sure that we use neutral language that is inviting, rather than Christian lingo that might cause conflicts (and I'm not saying that we do). Some things that were brought up against Sword that a clear information policy might have prevented: - Crosswire is trying to gain access to the openSUSE community in order to evangelize - the name Sword could be seen as a relic from a violent Christian past and such. Of course most of those arguments came out of sheer ignorance and the fact that those who uttered them did not even bother looking at the Crosswire web site at all, but nonetheless - I'm wondering if you who are in charge might not want to set up some guidelines for packagers and some official statements of purpose, maybe official package descriptions and such that packagers and other "ambassadors" might use in cases like that so that there are no misunderstandings and people don't see us in a bad light? There are some informative statements in this vein on the website already, but it might not hurt to think what can be improved to avoid any misconception about what SWORD is and wants is not and does not wants. Don't get me wrong, I do not mean to say that we should pay any attention to people who get "offended" by crosses in public settings and such. I'm nut sure those people can be helped at all. :-) I'm talking about the prevention of simple misunderstandings and just good PR. What do you think? God bless, Ben _______________________________________________ sword-devel mailing list: sword-devel@crosswire.org http://www.crosswire.org/mailman/listinfo/sword-devel Instructions to unsubscribe/change your settings at above page
