#57: Seeking Council feedback/input on draft third party software policy -------------------------+--------------------- Reporter: pfrields | Owner: Status: new | Priority: normal Component: General | Resolution: Keywords: workstation | -------------------------+--------------------- Comment (by uraeus): Replying to [comment:7 robyduck]: > ah, I only replied to the mail...pasting here again. > > Finally I've read this document, but I really have some concerns about third party software. > I'm one of those users who believes in Fedora, because it has no third party software in it. It's all open source, that makes it different to other distributions, otherwise I could use plenty of other distros. And I think we should care about this value, and also about all the users who chose Fedora because it has this characteristic. Furthermore, it is very very easy nowadays to install third party software, and people (already) do that on their own risk because often it compromises the Fedora system. > Even COPR is a third party repo, but it respects at least the Fedora guidelines, which other repos don't do. > > That said, I'm not against enabling a sort of shared installer which labels third party software, but it should not only label it but also pop up a warning that the end user is going to install software outside of the Fedora universe, and that this can in some cases compromise his system. People are used to click and don't think about what they are doing, so we should remember that clearly. I think the proposal also addresses most of your concerns, as there is no suggestion to ship Fedora with non-free software out of the box (well not beyond the firmware we already ship), but in terms of the warning do you want that to happen on every application install? Or on the first time the user tries to install a given piece of 3rd party software? I don't mind the first, but if you want the second I think we cross the line from informative to annoying. > I have also some concerns about replacing package formats, we should encourage community members to make Fedora packages, and not just allow upstream package formats. Like Matt I don't understand why we should prefer upstream packages, which very often care more about other distributions...let's prefer community member's packages. Well the document leaves it up to the working groups to decide which package they want to go with, and I think that is a better solution than mandating one or the other package. Which package is the best will be different on a case to case basis and it might even change over time, so tying the hands of the working groups is just shooting ourselves in the foot. In practice I would think that a Fedora specific package would be the best simply because it has been built and configured for Fedora, but I don't want one or the other to be hardcoded in the policy. > The document actually is still rather generic, if we want to allow third party software in some kind we need to write a very strict document about what we allow and what not. We can facilitate the use of third party software, but Fedora is free and should remain free and open source. Well remember this is a proposal for software to be available, not bundled or pre-installed, and once again I think we need the working groups to have the ability to evaluate this on an ongoing basis instead of coming up with detailed and inflexible rules and regulations. -- Ticket URL: <https://fedorahosted.org/council/ticket/57#comment:8> council <https://fedorahosted.org/council> Fedora Council Public Tickets _______________________________________________ council-discuss mailing list council-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct https://lists.fedoraproject.org/admin/lists/council-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx The Fedora Project's mission is to lead the advancement of free and open source software and content as a collaborative community.
