On 7/18/07, Max Spevack <mspevack@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
What follows: 4) To what extent is it appropriate for hooks or other "stuff that makes it easier for someone to do non-free stuff like CodecBuddy" to exist in Fedora? We need to decide on this from a philosophical standpoint.
I've absolutely no problem philosophical with making it reasonably easy for end-user to choose legal proprietary optional software, post-install. We already sort of do this for content through the rhythmbox to magnatunes et al. End users can choose to buy content that cannot be distributed as part of Fedora because its non-Free (in magnatune's case Non-Commercial CC) There is one primary caveat however. We need to be reasonable sure that making such choices more accessible does not come back to unduly burden Fedora developers and contributors via bug reports and other misplaced support requests that can't be dealt with. For music content, the probability of this is inherently low. For functional code, like a codec plugin we need to have some technical means in place to ensure support requests don't get shovelled to Fedora's bugtracker and just pile up. If we are going to integrate something like CodecBuddy and points people to an external source, do we also have a means to shuffle bugs and feature tickets into their hands as well? And can we get a commitment from 3rd party sources to be good citizens and actually deal with the bug reports? The secondary caveat is... we will also need to be reasonably sure that we are not creating exclusive partnerships. For whatever mechanisms we expose to users, there needs to be clear and public rules for inclusion and exclusion of 3rd party sources that are listed. We may decide for example, that exclusion may happen when a specific competing technology implementation becomes available in the mainline Fedora repositories which makes the 3rd party offering essentially duplicative.
6) Acknowledge that just because something is illegal in the US, it isn't illegal everywhere in the world. Help people use Fedora, remix Fedora, and redistribute Fedora, in ways that are Legal for them and acceptable to Red Hat as the legal entity that controls Fedora.
revisor and the open build system take this pretty far from a technical nuts and bolts point of view. But the harder question is how can we integrate these derivative works into the larger Fedora community in a way that lets everyone know that such efforts are welcomed and encouraged. How can we use the Fedora brand in a way that makes the Fedora project tent bigger so that we don't have to point to "them" but instead other people can point to "us" collectively so we can all benefit from the community building perception created from the additional volunteer work. -jef _______________________________________________ fedora-advisory-board mailing list fedora-advisory-board@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-advisory-board
