#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 mattdm): Replying to [comment:22 aday]: > This is a selective reply. If I haven't responded to an issue it is either fine or doesn't require follow up. Yep; I'll follow the same. Ideally we'll get down to nothing here. :) > But first, a general request: please make an effort to keep the amount of Fedora specific links and text to an absolute minimum. They result in a heavy maintenance and testing burden. That makes sense, but I'm also mindful that Fedora's mission and agenda aren't shared by all consumers of the software impacted by this. Fedora's mission isn't just to create an operating system that happens to be open source, but to actively "lead the advancement of Free and open source software and content". Since including curated links to proprietary software is on its face a non-neutral change, I want to make sure that we firmly place it in context. If we can do that in a way that meets our needs and also is acceptable as general defaults, that's even better, really. > I did work on a set of confirmation dialogs in the past, which I was led to believe was a Fedora requirement - I was probably thinking of that. Great if those aren't required! We are in new waters here. That includes that so far I've made most of the commentary on this ticket, and I don't alone speak for the whole community or Council. > > The emphasis on search is because that's the software and shell interface I've been looking at, but I definitely agree with you here too: this should apply to all presentation, not just search. > > It would be good if the policy could be updated to reflect this. I'll think about some updated wording taking your comments into account. > We've been working on improving the UI for this recently. The details page for each app now shows a prominent colour coded badge that indicates whether an app is free or proprietary. If you click on the badge, a popover is shown which explains what "free" or "proprietary" means, as well as details like which licenses are used. The explanation text is value driven but also tries to be informative. It's clear that free software is being presented positively and proprietary software negatively. Ok. In the rawhide version I'm looking at right now, the tags are gray rather than colored and there's no popover. What you describe seems good to me. > Now, you could add some "Fedora officially disapproves of proprietary software" text but I'd recommend against doing that. Telling your users off for something they're doing is one of the worst things you can do from a branding/user experience point of view. Much better to sell the benefits of free software and explain the issues with proprietary software in a way that doesn't imply a judgement on the user. That sounds reasonable. As above, I was thinking more along the lines of ''Learn more about free software and open source software and why this matters....'' than "you are a terrible person for using proprietary software". > I really have to question whether this is necessary. We already provide a simple explanation in the UI. It might not communicate the Fedora world view in all its nuanced subtly, but I would be *really* surprised if there is any appetite amongst users to read detailed licensing information and adding these links will be a lot of work. If we provide links to license information, it does need to at least be the right mapping, even if it's a lot of work. I agree with Richard that it's unfortunate that we're not regularized with SPDX, but we're not the only ones (see Debian https://wiki.debian.org/Proposals/CopyrightFormat#Differences_between_DEP5_and_SPDX) and it's not an easy thing to fix. But I wasn't talking about the specific license information; I was thinking more of a "why open source is awesome". In talking to Christian, one case for presenting proprietary software is to bring in new users who don't understand our values or culture. I don't think there's a lot of value in doing that if we don't take the opportunity to help them learn. You can disagree with me, and that's fine -- but also exactly why I thought it might be a good idea to have something Fedora-specific here. I'd be just as happy with non-specific materials which are well-aligned with our mission. > > > I'm generally unconvinced by the idea of prioritising apps in search results based on whether they are free or not. In terms of the Software app, I doubt very much that the position of an app in the [...] > > Right now, I count 11 results for "web browser" in Software. Not all of them are "good" results. > Right, you only get 2 or 3 actual browsers. The order of these isn't going to make any difference to how the user perceives the options. Really? To me at least, ordering matters quite a lot. There's a reason people want to be the top hit on Google, etc. > "when presenting software that has the same functionality, non-free alternatives should not be given a non-trivial degree of prominence over free/open software options" ? I like that, but I guess I'd prefer "when presenting software that has the same functionality, free/open source software ''should'' be given a non-trivial degree of prominence over non-free options". > > Previously, I gave an example ''"Other results appear in the [nonfree] tag, which is currently filtered out. Click to reset this filter. Fedora does not endorse non-free software. Learn more about [free software and open source software and why this matters....]"''. This is obviously implementation, but I hope it's illustrative. Or, if someone searches for particular software and there is an exact match by name, that could show up as ''"{Chrome} appears in the [nonfree] tag, which is ... (then same as above)"''. > > Please remember that software can be presented in multiple ways - in search results in the shell, when browsing using the Software app, when an app is requested to open a particular file type, when an app requests a particular codec, and who knows what other ways. We can't go embedding this choice into every one of those situations. I guess I see it as an extra bonus towards discoverability, and something which could easily just be left off in cases where there's no opportunity (and just not show currently-filtered-out options at all in those cases). > With that in mind, this "action" would probably have to be presented as an option to enable non-free software as a part of the initial setup process. Again, please try and keep your UI prescriptions to a minimum: the policy could simply state "non-free software must be explicitly enabled by a user before it is made visible in any UI". That's short and clear, and leaves us to figure out the details. I don't have a strong opinion on this — seems like an implementation detail. I guess my two concerns are first that existing users won't see the initial setup screen (I can't remember the last time I saw it other than when intentionally testing!) and second that it's my impression that many new users click through that setup screen quickly and then later forget what was there, so I presume you'd want it somewhere else easily discoverable as well. (That's one thing I liked about the search-tags mockup I saw — it wasn't a "buried setting".) -- Ticket URL: <https://fedorahosted.org/council/ticket/57#comment:25> 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.
