Re: [Savannah-hackers-public] CAcert, IceCat, and savannah

[Noah Slater]

On Wed, Oct 08, 2008 at 06:39:03PM +0200, Sylvain Beucler wrote:
> I can't accept arguments such as "it's not pre-included" from people
> who support an OS that is essentially never pre-installed.

This confused me. What operating systems are you talking about?

The argument I think you're referencing is that as CAcert is not shipped with
the major browsers on the major operating systems, most users of Savannah are
going to be faced with a very confusing error message.

It's important to realise that not everyone is as technical as some of the
subscribers to this list, and expecting them to understand and then fix some
obscure HTTP security issue is a little far fetched.

>From the point of view of a "regular" user, Savannah is "broken".

> Similarly restricting the problem to a money issue is like being OK with
> gratis student licenses from a priorietary OS vendor.

As I mentioned before, as much as I agree, I don't think Savannah is the correct
forum to be having or pursuing this debate.

> Savannah isn't the only free-software-related website that supports
> CAcert.org. See for example https://www.april.org/

This is an argumentum ad populum.

Just because someone else does it does not mean that Savannah should also.

> CAcert is also the only certification authority that makes people _think_
> about what trust is, which can't be more in sync with the educational purpose
> of Savannah.

Maybe, but maybe most users don't want to think about obscure HTTP security 
issues.

I am willing to bet that most users wouldn't know what it means anyway, so any
opportunity for constructive thought is out of the window. The only thing I can
imagine the majority of users thinking is "this stupid website is broken."

Best,

-- 
Noah Slater, http://bytesexual.org/nslater