The future of fortune(6)

[Gerry Weaver]

Hello All,

Why not just keep fortune and tips in base and push the rest to a package? This way history could be   reasonably preserved and you would have to opt in to get the rest. 

BTW: I apologize, if someone has already suggested this. I may have missed a few posts.

Thanks,
-G
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-freebsd-hackers at freebsd.org [mailto:owner-freebsd-hackers at freebsd.org] On Behalf Of Bill Sorenson
Sent: Sunday, November 26, 2017 10:31 PM
To: mike at karels.net
Cc: freebsd-hackers at freebsd.org; Benno Rice <benno at freebsd.org>; freebsd-arch at freebsd.org
Subject: Re: The future of fortune(6)

> No kidding.  At least 30 years ago, when I was at CSRG, a female 
> professor complained that she had received an offensive fortune when she logged out.
> After some investigation, we found that she was using her husband's 
> account, and he had "fortune -o" in his .logout file.  Case closed.
>
>                 Mike
>

I want to 2nd Mike Karels' sentiments. There is a *big* - huge - massive difference between words people don't like and someone being offensive.

I don't want to give the impression that I see value in having Hitler quotes in base, I don't, its out. Great by me. At the same time I don't see the value of scrubbing base of arrangements of words people don't like. If I see that fortune spits out a Rush Limbaugh quote, a Hitler quote, an Franklin D Roosevelt quote or an Al Franken quote or a bad joke I for one don't instantly come to the assumption that this is somehow an endorsement by the project or even a commiter of any particular thing. Its just stuff in history. In a way thats really what fortune is, a collection of history (even if just FreeBSD tips).

Frankly, I'm a bit offended (if mildly) by the stance that "we've decided to excise fortune from base because its a tool used to spread hate and bad ideas." This is dangerously approaching the point of censoring the project because of how people might decide to use the software. Even Richard Stallman doesn't go for this sort of thing.
Maybe we should start to discuss ripping OpenSSH out of base because it could be used in the commission of a felony or to hurt somebody's feelings. I don't want to remove vi from base just because I feel stupid after using it. There is a cost to having a free and open society, one of those is that someone may use fortune to print detestable quotes about Hitler on their terminal.

I for one would recommend leaving things alone unless it is a substantive improvement.

-Bill S.
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