Re: Recommending proprietary software in Fedora

["John M. Harris, Jr." <johnmh@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

There is a difference between ignoring proprietary software, and providing installation methods for it in the distro. It is against the first of the Four Foundations, Freedom, to include these repositories. It's one thing if the user seeks out the software and installs it themselves, it's another if we're baiting them into installing software that does not provide the four Essential Freedoms.

Not only that, but we can make no guarantee as to the state of these repos or the state of the software, as it is proprietary. This is also a potential issue for Fedora Legal.

On October 15, 2019 5:00:37 PM UTC, Przemek Klosowski via devel <devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 10/14/19 6:19 AM, Kevin Kofler wrote:
mcatanzaro@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
 John, the third-party software policy was approved after a long and
 contentious debate:

 https://gcc01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url="">
 That policy is still completely at odds with the Fedora objectives.
 Recommending proprietary software is entirely incompatible with the Freedom
 goal and actively works against it. So this policy needs to be revisited to
 exclude proprietary software or repealed entirely.

It's a difficult choice. My understanding is that Fedora does not 
'recommend' proprietary software, but rather allows it to be found, in 
response to people searching for it by either specific terms (package 
name) or specific functionality.

Are you arguing that the only choice compatible with Fedora principles 
is to ignore the existence of proprietary software? I think this would 
be contrary to the interests of the users. Speaking for myself, when 
people ask me about image editing software, I say that I recommend the 
FOSS product GIMP, but that there is also an excellent proprietary 
Photoshop. I am not comfortable just mentioning one to the exclusion of 
the other.

I think the overall goal for FOSS software is to be technically 
excellent and compete successfully with proprietary software. Ignoring 
non-FOSS software is actually counterproductive to that goal.
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Sent from my mobile device. Please excuse my brevity.
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