#57: Seeking Council feedback/input on draft third party software policy
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Reporter: pfrields | Owner:
Status: new | Priority: normal
Component: General | Resolution:
Keywords: workstation |
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Comment (by aday):
Replying to [comment:25 mattdm]:
...
> But first, a general request: please make an effort to keep the
amount
of Fedora specific links and text to an absolute minimum. They result in a
heavy maintenance and testing burden.
That makes sense, but I'm also mindful that Fedora's mission and agenda
aren't shared by all consumers of the software impacted by this. Fedora's
mission isn't just to create an operating system that happens to be open
source, but to actively "lead the advancement of Free and open source
software and content". Since including curated links to proprietary
software is on its face a non-neutral change, I want to make sure that we
firmly place it in context. If we can do that in a way that meets our
needs and also is acceptable as general defaults, that's even better,
really.
I understand that there has to be balance. I am simply requesting that
maintenance burden be factored in - our resources are limited and this
policy is going to generate additional ongoing work for the team.
> I did work on a set of confirmation dialogs in the past, which I
was
led to believe was a Fedora requirement - I was probably thinking of that.
Great if those aren't required!
We are in new waters here. That includes that so far I've made most of
the
commentary on this ticket, and I don't alone speak for the whole
community or Council.
Sure, we'll certainly wait before the policy is finalised before making
any changes.
> I really have to question whether this is necessary. We already
provide a simple explanation in the UI. It might not communicate the
Fedora world view in all its nuanced subtly, but I would be *really*
surprised if there is any appetite amongst users to read detailed
licensing information and adding these links will be a lot of work.
This comment was made under the assumption that "Fedora educational
materials" was some additional information about the licenses themselves,
such as which licenses are approved by Fedora and how they should be
interpreted - detailed legal and political interpretation, in other words.
From your response below I see that that is probably incorrect; if this
part of the policy remains, it might help for it to elaborate on what
"Fedora educational materials" are and what their purpose is.
If we provide links to license information, it does need to at least
be
the right mapping, even if it's a lot of work. I agree with Richard that
it's unfortunate that we're not regularized with SPDX, but we're not the
only ones (see Debian
https://wiki.debian.org/Proposals/CopyrightFormat#Differences_between_DEP...)
and it's not an easy thing to fix.
But I wasn't talking about the specific license information; I was
thinking
more of a "why open source is awesome". In talking to Christian,
one case for presenting proprietary software is to bring in new users who
don't understand our values or culture. I don't think there's a lot of
value in doing that if we don't take the opportunity to help them learn.
You can disagree with me, and that's fine -- but also exactly why I
thought it might be a good idea to have something Fedora-specific here.
I'd be just as happy with non-specific materials which are well-aligned
with our mission.
I think it's important to provide links to the full license text; I'll
leave you to argue over the details for that with Richard. I'm also fine
with linking to generic "why open source is awesome" material. However, it
would be really preferable if this could be non-Fedora specific - it will
be a lot less work for us.
> > > I'm generally unconvinced by the idea of
prioritising apps in
search results based on whether they are free or not. In terms
of the
Software app, I doubt very much that the position of an app in the
[...]
> > Right now, I count 11 results for "web browser" in Software. Not all
of them are "good" results.
> Right, you only get 2 or 3 actual browsers. The order of these
isn't
going to make any difference to how the user perceives the options.
Really? To me at least, ordering matters quite a lot. There's a reason
people
want to be the top hit on Google, etc.
I'm largely thinking about cases where there is some familiarity with the
applications on offer, which is somewhat different from the generic search
engine case. That said I see the point about search results ordering
having an impact. At the same time I would still argue against the
necessity of tweaking search results in this way, since we'd be adding
extra logic for a case that will be fairly infrequent. Do we really want
to spend developer time on tweaking what happens when someone searches for
"web browser"?
> "when presenting software that has the same functionality,
non-free
alternatives should not be given a non-trivial degree of prominence over
free/open software options" ?
I like that, but I guess I'd prefer "when presenting software that has
the same functionality, free/open source software ''should'' be given a
non-trivial degree of prominence over non-free options".
That's an inversion of the logic I was suggesting. :) My point was: let's
only make special effort when it is going to have a significant impact.
You're saying that we should always make a special effort.
While I'm happy for us to make an effort when it counts, it's simply not
practical to change the logic in every case that software might be
presented to a user.
> > Previously, I gave an example ''"Other results
appear in the
[nonfree] tag, which is currently filtered out. Click to reset this
filter. Fedora does not endorse non-free software. Learn more about [free
software and open source software and why this matters....]"''. This is
obviously implementation, but I hope it's illustrative. Or, if someone
searches for particular software and there is an exact match by name, that
could show up as ''"{Chrome} appears in the [nonfree] tag, which is ...
(then same as above)"''.
>
> Please remember that software can be presented in multiple ways - in
search
results in the shell, when browsing using the Software app, when an
app is requested to open a particular file type, when an app requests a
particular codec, and who knows what other ways. We can't go embedding
this choice into every one of those situations.
I guess I see it as an extra bonus towards discoverability, and
something which
could easily just be left off in cases where there's no
opportunity (and just not show currently-filtered-out options at all in
those cases).
> With that in mind, this "action" would probably have to be presented
as an option to enable non-free software as a part of the initial setup
process. Again, please try and keep your UI prescriptions to a minimum:
the policy could simply state "non-free software must be explicitly
enabled by a user before it is made visible in any UI". That's short and
clear, and leaves us to figure out the details.
I don't have a strong opinion on this — seems like an implementation
detail. I
guess my two concerns are first that existing users won't see
the initial setup screen (I can't remember the last time I saw it other
than when intentionally testing!) and second that it's my impression that
many new users click through that setup screen quickly and then later
forget what was there, so I presume you'd want it somewhere else easily
discoverable as well. (That's one thing I liked about the search-tags
mockup I saw — it wasn't a "buried setting".)
We can work on the specific design - I don't think we need to figure out
the exact solution here. My point was that the proposed policy specified a
UI which wasn't practical. It would be preferable if you didn't specify
the exact UI to be used, so we can figure out the best solution - those of
us who work on the software are in a better position to do that. Again, my
suggestion for the policy would be something simple and abstract:
"Non-free software must be explicitly enabled by a user before it is made
visible in any UI."
You could add an additional clause like:
"However, the availability of non-free software options can be advertised
prior to its enablement, provided that specific details about that
software are not displayed."
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