On Mon, Oct 14, 2019 at 4:19 PM, John M. Harris Jr <johnmh@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
And proprietary software, in your opinion, does not?
The requirements for including proprietary software are spelled out just two paragraphs above the section on legal requirements:
"""
Software not deemed "free" by Fedora standards, for instance Google Chrome, would be labelled both "third party" and "nonfree" for not conforming to Fedora's definition of free. Over time further labels may be introduced to further inform users. For the Workstation edition, this labelling will be clearly visible in GNOME Software, the primary software installer for the
desktop. For other editions and tools, the maintainers of said installers would need to work with FESCo to decide how to provide this labelling information in the relevant tools.
"""
It should be beyond doubt that proprietary software was considered when writing the policy. Then we have one paragraph on "Principles," which I'll skip. Then we have the legal requirements:
"""
Just as with any software hosted by Fedora, third party software must not contain material that poses undue legal risk for the Fedora Project or its sponsors. This includes, but is not limited to, software with known patent issues, copyright issues or software tailored for conducting illegal activities. The Fedora working groups will evaluate if a proposed addition or provider poses a significant risk, and if in doubt confer with Fedora Legal for advice.
"""
It only requires legal approval for software with known patent issues, copyright issues, or software tailored for conducting illegal activities (which means penetration testing tools).
The rules require that repos containing proprietary software not be searchable by default, only upon opt-in user consent. Furthermore, after consent, the installed repos are still disabled; they are used only for metadata to present search results. A repo will only be enabled once software from that repo is installed. The point of this policy was to make it easier for users to install software like the NVIDIA proprietary driver, Google Chrome, etc. It was a difficult compromise between keeping Fedora itself fully free, but also making sure users
who want certain popular software don't feel like it would be easier to just use other distros instead.
Steam has already been included since Fedora 28 [1].
Michael
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