On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 01:37:38PM -0500, Christian Schaller wrote: > Hi Toshio, > While we might want to update some of the pages you mention, for most of them there is no need. > I both agree and disagree with you here. There is no *need* to update the other pages mentioned. As I said, the minimum that the Board would have to decide upon for FESCo to write a policy for pointing to repositories contianing non-free content would be whether Fedora should allow that specific pointing. However, I think it is desirable to make changes to those pages. The support that Fedora has for libre software is an underlying philosophy that subtly affects many of our policies and future decisions. It's important to document these things so that we know what we and our future contributors are on the same page as we go down the road. > They are just general statements about wishing to support free software, which we do. Firstly, that's not the case for all of the statements I listed. Some of them make statements about proprietary software that should be changed to be more clear. Beyond that the problem is properly managing expectations. For instance, reading the Freedom Foundation, we see that we aren't just "supporting" free software. Instead we are dedicated to it. We advance it as a central goal. We limit the effects of proprietary code. We avoid taking the easy way out. And we create products and processes that anyone can copy for their own purposes. Those are much more active and agreesively proming of libre-software than simply saying that we "support" free software. The use of these words without any contering wording about how we feel about proprietary software sets up the reasonable expectation that Fedora should not be making it easy for proprietary software to be installed. I think that the current wording sprinkled throughout our many "philosophical" documents of the Project serve to make the expectation that we *do not support proprietary software* and that we may even actively work to make proprietary software unwelcome if it doesn't do anything that libre software can do just as well. To counter that (if the Board does think we should counter that), we should say something that makes clear that our boundaries are actually less strident than that. We might want to rework everything to be more like what's written on the Objectives page (currently as a non-objective of Fedora): "While we do not purposely make installation of such components more difficult, we also do not allow our schedule or processes to be driven by theirs." (Note that the part immediately preceding that on the page should be toned down as part of this reworking). This would be very similar to what Fedora currently does in practice and a very minor emphasis change in the rest of the documents. I don't think that's enough to encompass making pointing to third party, non-libre software repositories an integral part of our products, though. For that, I think we would want to go a bit further and talk about how we cooperate with proprietary software. The previous example might be stated as "The only the only promise we make is not to make changes solely to break proprietary software". A better statement that would encompass pointing to some proprietary software would be "We want people to be able to do anything they need with our platform and therefore we make it easy for them to find proprietary software when no libre-software exists to do the same thing". That statement might not encompass Adobe Acrobat or Google Chrome (at least, as long as the flash plugin for firefox continues to work for most flash content), though. A position that might encompass those could be: "We want people to be able to have the freedom to choose what they want to do with their system, including running proprietary software. We endeavor to make it just as easy for people to run proprietary software as the libre-software alternatives that exist." (/me notes that ajax once defined a position that is also at odds with this [the Linux-is-not-about-choice position] but that never made it into written policy.) [...] The rest of your message seems to be about how we need to allow non-libre software in some shape or form to retain users. Since I'm not on the Board, those aren't the piece of this discussion that are relevant to my critique but the Board should definitely consider them when they decide whether to ajust our current position on non-libre software. -Toshio
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