Board efforts: scope, concept, and permission?

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

Kevin Kofler wrote on 03.02.2010 19:08:
> Josh Boyer wrote:
>> It is.  It's one step removed.  There were people actively wanting to make
>> Zope/Plone work via a compat-python stack.  It went all the way to FESCo
>> and got voted down.  The zope/plone users were the target audience there.
>> There were people willing to do the work, all they needed was a yes from
>> FESCo.  We told them no.  As Jesse has mentioned, 'status quo' won out.
> I think this was just a bad decision. I complained back then and I still 
> think we did the wrong thing.

Strong +1 to this

> We should be as encompassing as legally 
> possible within our Free Software ideals. Those packages eventually ended up 
> in RPM Fusion anyway, like most of the stuff we refuse, so what was the 
> point of preventing them from going into Fedora? Supportability concerns 
> aren't going to vanish just because the package ends up in a third-party 
> repository, and we have no way to prevent that.
> 
> I also think for the same reasons that we should allow acceptably-licensed 
> (GPLv2 or compatible) kernel modules as external packages in Fedora, banning 
> them gains us nothing and loses us hardware support we could gain without 
> any moral (software freedom) compromises or legal risks.

As one of those behind the kmod stuff and someone interested in the
topic for years: I think having the kernel modules outside of Fedora is
very good thing, as that makes it quite clear to everyone: "This is
unsupported by Fedora and its upstream source and hence might be crap
and vanish at any time; don't rely on it and don't buy (or suggest
others buying) hardware that is supported by this crap like this".

Further: In the end it afaics all boils does to the "if it's not good
for the official kernel, why should it be good enough for Fedora".

By shipping that stuff we also might cannibalize upstream, which is not
good for everyone in the long term most of the time and afaics. Or, IOW:
The more changes and out-of-tree stuff Fedora integrates into its kernel
the closer we get to a mess like the one with Android that is currently
discussed quite a lot on the net ( http://lwn.net/Articles/372419/ and
the comments there ). Sure, it is unlikely that it becomes that bad for
us, but I for one would prefer if Fedora would not even go down that
route at all and works so close with upstream that we ideally can ship
vanilla kernels.

Cu
knurd