I'm in Porto Alegre attending the FISL (Brazilian Free Software) conference. Free software gets a lot of play down here in Brazil. There's an edited copy of the Ubuntu distribution on the FSF's tabletop, as well as an edited copy of the Kubuntu distribution. The edits look like this: NOT NOT This software is free software. You are encouraged to share it ^ ^ The point the FSF is making is that Ubuntu includes non-free software, like nVidia drivers. I believe that the last go-round on the Fedora lists about our strong, STRONG commitment to free software suggests that we can take a strong position, and enlist the free software community to take a stand for us and with us. Today, we have the following packaging guidelines for Fedora: The goal of The Fedora Project is to work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from open source software. In accordance with that, all packages included in Fedora must be covered under an open source license. We clarify an open source license in three ways: * OSI-approved license. You can find the list of OSI approved licenses here: [WWW]http://www.opensource.org/licenses/ * GPL-Compatible, Free Software Licenses. You can find the list here: [WWW]http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license- list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses * GPL-Incompatible, Free Software Licenses. You can find the list here: [WWW]http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license- list.html#GPLIncompatibleLicenses If the license of a package isn't covered in one of those lists, urge the upstream maintainer to seek OSI-approval for their license here: [WWW]http://www.opensource.org/docs/certification_mark.php#approval Alternately, if code is dual licensed, and one of the licenses meets the open source license criteria, that code can be included in Fedora under the open source license. Kernel-module packages must use one of the following licenses: GNU General Public License v2.0, GNU Lesser General Public License v2, IBM Public License v1.0, Common Public License v0.5, Q Public License v1.0, Open Software License v1.1, or any open source license granted by Red Hat. Note that any kernel module licensed with any license except GPL or LGPL will taint the kernel. I'm wondering what you guys think about changing the tilt of Fedora from open source to free software. Namely, saying that the license should meet the free software definition ( http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html ) and then mentioning that OSI-certified licenses (with the exception of the Reciprocal Public License, which we're going to reevaluate) are a good list, as well as the free software licenses that are listed on the FSF website. The goal is to make Fedora a distribution that the FSF can positively endorse. I think we're really close. Any reason to not try to go all the way? M