Draft Product Description for Fedora Workstation

[Christian Schaller]

<SNIP>
> >> So sure, we can have software that will pull things in if the user has
> >> done some manual intervention.  We just cant, currently, do that thing
> >> for them.
> >
> > Right, that's exactly what I was saying. I just think this is all the
> > _original poster_ was talking about, not any kind of automatic
> > configuration of such repositories. (Or at least, you can read it that
> > way).
> 
> OK.  I guess that's fine, but it seems like a non-goal to me.  I mean,
> it already works that way.  All adding it to the PRD would do would
> make an easy thing to check off the list as "met".

>I suppose we should go back to the OP and ask for clarification of
>exactly what the idea was, at this point :)

So there are 3 different cases here

1) Packaging non-free/semi-free software in Fedora - I don't think anyone is advocating that - ref recent openh264 thread
2) Enabling 3rd party repositories with packages that have an unclear legal status is major jurisdictions - This is not what the PRD was referring too, and we have a solution for that already
3) Easily enabling 3rd party repositories containing software that is without any legal uncertainty, but which contains software which might not meet the Fedora guidelines for stuff we would include.

So it is item 3 that the PRD is addressing. An example here would be Google Chrome. Google provides a yum repo for Google Chrome for Fedora and Google stands behind Chrome legally, so if they also do the work of putting in an appdata file there we should figure out a simple way for users to install Chrome from the GNOME Software application. The exact details of how we do that enablement can and should be discussed, but it should be something simpler than how we currently enable the (2) option, yet at the same time we probably don't want to give them equal billing to the Fedora packaged and 100% open source stuff we make available in the Fedora repository.

As a sidenote, as we delve into the details a bit more here maybe it is time to move these discussions to the product specific mailing list to not spam the general devel list?

Christian