Proposal: Revision of policy surrounding 3rd party and non-free software

[Josh Boyer]

On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 11:41 AM, Matthew Miller
<mattdm at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 11:35:40AM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
>> > From the Fedora perspective, there are users who have Fedora who also want
>> > to use the Nvidia blob, and your proposal is to enable them. It makes sense,
>> > in the sense that you are working to solve Fedora problems, where you have
>> > some influence. "Fedora supports Nvidia" doesn't fly though, and regardless
>> > of the language you use or implementation details like shipping metadata
>> > instead of binaries, that *is* the perceived message of your proposal.
>> A small but important clarification here.  In the proposal, Fedora
>> would not ship binaries and would not ship metadata.  It would not
>> ship anything related to a 3rd party repository other than knowing the
>> web-accessible location of a repository.  It is, in effect anyway, the
>> equivalent of doing a "google: nvidia linux repository" in a software
>> installer.
>> I'm not elaborating on the broader story, but I did want to clarify
>> the technical details.  Fedora is not shipping anything in this
>> proposal.
>
> Pedantic but (maybe) important distinction: the idea would be to prepopulate
> (in some way or another) the software installer application with _specific_
> 3rd party repositories (in the mockup, Adobe, Dropbox, Google, Nvidia, and
> Steam) -- akin more to having the default Fedora bookmarks include the
> download pages at those companies than to a Google search. Or am I
> misunderstanding?

The bookmark analogy seems fair to me, yes.  However, it might be
feasible to include these "bookmarks" without having them displayed by
default and instead requiring a user to toggle a checkbox or such to
enable them.

If you combine that with Bill's restaurant analogy from elsewhere in
the thread, you could display your vegan menu in it's full glory for
the user to peruse.  It could explain all the wonderful benefits of
the items, and then have a footnote at the bottom akin to "not seeing
what you'd like?  Turn the menu over for less healthy alternatives
like shrimp and grits", etc.  Hopefully that analogy isn't too
confusing.

Again, I'm just focusing on the technical aspects.

josh