On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 11:04 AM, Jon Stanley > 1) It creates a "endorsement" from the Fedora project > 2) People in certain parts of the world can get the equivalent > functionality in free software, legally. reason 3) By pointing users to any 3rd party vendor via default system interactions creates an implicit expectation that the material that users are being pointed to does in fact work as advertised and if it does not that there is a process by which this stuff can get fixed. It doesn't matter if we make some hand wavy argument in the textual information that such 3rd party software is not supported...we say that about our own software. If we point people to a 3rd party then we'll have created an expectation that the software hosted by that 3rd party does function with our default configuration. Regardless of other philosophical reasoning associated with reasons 1 and 2... if people were to advocate to have Fedora client system interactions fallback by pointing users to any software space outside of this project's control, I would need those advocates to put forward a reasonable pre-release testing plan and bugfix updating process that this project could rely on with regard to those 3rd party bits. If 3rd party software does not integrate as well, who's on the hook for making sure it does? Surely not our releng team, because they have no direct authority over how the software in those 3rd party vendors is patched or packaged. By pointing people to any particular vendor we create an implicit expectation that the software there will function. If it doesn't for example work with selinux out of the box then our project's developers might not have the access necessary to fix the problem in the 3rd party packaging. I'm not particular thrilled with being put in a position where we are asked to point users to things "over there" if and when those things "over there" don't work as expected and we don't have the access to fix them for our users. -jef _______________________________________________ fedora-advisory-board mailing list fedora-advisory-board@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-advisory-board
