On Tue, 2007-05-01 at 08:21 -0500, Rex Dieter wrote: > Alexandre Oliva wrote: > > >> Atleast in Fedora the division is clearly documented in the > >> packaging guidelines. > > > > Which is and has always been incompatible with the stated goals of the > > Fedora project. > > It may be worth pointing out here that Fedora currently only includes > objectives/packaging-guidelines to be opensource/redistributable, not > necessarily (100%) free, This sentence of yours doesn't match with current practices: From http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Guidelines?packaging#head-8be956fd12dbe4ae927e65c989e7e83b9fcc0b80 --- snip --- 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: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/ * GPL-Compatible, Free Software Licenses. You can find the list here: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses * GPL-Incompatible, Free Software Licenses. You can find the list here: 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: http://www.opensource.org/docs/certification_mark.php#approval --- snip --- I.e. the Fedora definition of "OpenSource" is being redirected to "OSI" and the GPL. >From http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd --- snip --- 3. Derived Works The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software. --- snip --- => The firmware packages do not fall under this definition. > and wrt *this* conversation, the Board > considered firmware to be an acceptable exception(1). This doesn't match with the Fedora definition of "OpenSource" listed above, and leave room for accusations to "FPB cheating to the community on the freedom of SW in Fedora" and/or "the FPB having dumped objectives". Given your rationale, I think the FPC should abandon tying contributed packages to the OSI and GPL to return to "applying the same rights on everyone". > (1) redistributability was considered good enough (for now), notably > because firmware is tied to hardware, and doesn't run on the host cpu. This rationale suffers from same defects as inclusion of other non-modifiable SW: You can't fix bugs nor modify it to adapt it to special demands, because you can't modify the SW being shipped. Wrt. firmware, it is even worse: Technically, the position of firmware is not unlike using "close source kernel modules". If a firmware bugs kills the kernel, the kernel devs will not be able to do much about it (They or an educated user can have a look into the firmware's sources and might even be able to fix it, but nobody inside of Fedora be able to ship a fixed package). Ralf _______________________________________________ fedora-advisory-board mailing list fedora-advisory-board@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-advisory-board
