Hi Workstation Working Group, So now that that Council finalized on the 3rd party software proposal in a positive way (https://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/1617) we need to figure out the details on how we want to approach this as a working group. As mentioned in previous discussions and in the concrete proposal there will need to be some kind of procurement process here to ensure we don't drag Fedora and Red Hat into legal troubles. So let me start by listing what think should be our guiding principles for dealing with 3rd party software. a) We want the process of inclusion technical bit to be well documented and clear b) We want the process for inclusion in Fedora Workstation to be as transparent as possible. So for a) I have already asked Richard Hughes to draft up a document including all technical requirements for a 3rd party application to show up in GNOME Software. He made a start of that in this blog entry (https://blogs.gnome.org/hughsie/2016/09/02/fedora-25-and-additional-software-sources/) My idea is that we build and that and ensure we get an article up on the Fedora Developer Portal with this information and more. Basically I want it to cover every step from source tarball to finished RPM/Flatpak and hosting. I figure that this will in some sense be the easy step as all items here are already known we just need to pull things together and document them. for b) things are a bit more of a blank sheet currently my thoughts on this are as follows: So the process of procuring a new application has a few natural steps. 1) application developer reaching out to us or we reaching out to application developer 2) we discuss the technical requirements of a) with said developer 3) we discuss any legal issues with said developer (sounds scary, but it could just be pointing said developer to a terms of service agreement 4) if developer have already done or is willing to do 2) we decide if we want to include said application in GNOME Software. 5) we include the URL to their repository in our 3rd party repositories package So one thing I been thinking quite a bit about here is that for many developers whose application could potentially be included might want to be able to have a non-public discussion with us on it first. There could be many reasons for this including not wanting to create a public expectation of something before they finally decided upon doing it to needing to figure out some technical or legal details before committing etc. So my suggestion is that we as workstation working group members empower ourselves to be able to speak with this companies and people in confidence, but that we make it clear that the final decision to include will be a public one, done as part of the working group meetings. This should hopefully let us balance the need for privacy in initial discussions to having a clear public paper trail to how and when something was agreed to go inn. We should also develop some kind of inclusion policy document, drawn from the basic guidelines of the Council proposal, to ensure that the inclusion decision is highly predictable. I will also have another chat with the Red Hat lawyers to figure out the details of what kind of legal vetting etc., we need to do here. Any other ideas or suggestions for how we proceed here? I assume that no matter what we decide upon we will need to adjust it as we get going and we deal with the real issues that might or might not pop up. Sincerely, Christian -- desktop mailing list desktop@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.fedoraproject.org/admin/lists/desktop@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
