On 02/12/2014 04:31 PM, Matthias Clasen wrote:
Are we allowed to ship software in Fedora that dynamically loads
advertisements from the web and shows them to users?
I think "allowed" is probably the wrong term to use here. Fedora
packaging rules on what is allowed to be included have pretty much
focused on legality of packages. ie licensing, trademarks, patents,
etc. The question of whether advertisements are "allowed" is starting
to venture into the grounds of philosophy. There's probably also a
privacy question to answer here too. To me though, those aren't
criteria for forbidding software from Fedora entirely, but are
relevant when choosing whether a piece of software is set as the
default option installed for users.
Yeah, I agree. This is not about being allowed to, but the question is
whether we want to. And for that, the question probably is: it depends.
I can't imagine having very obnoxious and prominents advertisements in
the flagship applications that we install by default. But an application
that is otherwise useful to our users should probably not be banned from
the package universe just because it downloads an ad.
If that ad enables tracking users, or is obnoxious in any way, the
software should be modified to not include the ad.
I believe a major advantage of a free distribution like Fedora, over an
app store like Android's, is that it tries to do what's best for the
users, not developers and advertisers. Let's not change that, please.
--
Petr³
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