conf/138672: ISO 3166 call Taiwan a wrong name, please call Taiwan "Taiwan" as before.

[Kang-min Liu]

The following reply was made to PR conf/138672; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Kang-min Liu <gugod at gugod.org>
To: bug-followup at FreeBSD.org,
 linpct at gmail.com
Cc:  
Subject: Re: conf/138672: ISO 3166 call Taiwan a wrong name, please call Taiwan "Taiwan" as before.
Date: Thu, 17 Sep 2009 09:10:03 +0900

 Although it has been stated several times that it's a political
 problem instead of a technical ones, it shall be also pointed
 out, the decision of simply following ISO 3166 in FreeBSD is
 nonetheless, political.
 
 The ISO 3166 FAQ has an entry on the naming of Taiwan issue:
 
      http://www.iso.org/iso/country_codes/iso_3166-faqs/iso_3166_faqs_specific.htm
 
 Please notices the facts that:
 
 - UN holds strong positions in the making ISO 3166
 - Taiwan has never been the member of UN
 - The names in ISO 3166-1 are taken from United Nations sources
 
 Being a technology leading country, I guess Taiwan has been
 politically weak for way too long. The application to be UN
 member has been failed for very long time. It's not like Taiwan
 government has never put effort on it, they tried, for tens of
 years, but the political force against their efforts has been
 huge.
 
 Is it really politically neutral to follow ISO 3316 ? Please
 re-think about it. It is indeed very technically convienent to
 simply use ISO 3316 database because it contains a lots of
 country names. But the outcome of leaping without thinking, could
 be very bad.
 
 I've always think it's fairly neutral not to use "Country"
 selector in but "Region" selector (in whatever program UI.)
 Region is a much better choice since the word itself doesn't not
 refer to political identity of the its residents.