Regarding re branded Fedora Remixes using Fedora community resources.

Fri Oct 22 12:50:32 UTC 2010

Greetings.

I would like the board to review the current policy for Unoffical Fedora remixes and clarify what ( if any ) of our community resources they can use and if so how they should go about using them and update guidelines accordingly.

These Remixes have a tendency to direct users to the Fedora community for help with any problems they encounter often proprietary related which the community has no means to fix which serves no other purpose then increase noise on mailing list and waist people times and network bandwith, cpu cycles and hd space.

Often these remixes come without any documentation ( as is the case with the latest remix called Fusion linux nothing on their website at the time of this writing ) on how they deviate from Fedora and how the end users is supposed to find out if the trouble he is experiencing is Fedora related or direct result running the proprietary code or other changes made by the authors of the remix themselves which will results in case of a bug report for example that the triager/tester/maintainer them self spending time debugging and trying to reproduce the problem on Fedora only to find out after all that work that the individual is not running Fedora ( At least one remix author has directed is user base to say that they are doing so [1] outright lie to the community ) but some remix or in some cases another distro ( as was the case with bug 588930 ).

So I ask this the board this.

Should unoffical Fedora remixes that contain proprietary bits which violate Fedora foundation and mission that may or may not come from a 3 party repo to be allowed to use community resource such as mailing lists, irc channels, bugzilla etc to announce,advertise,endorse,diagnose,report etc. which result in community resource being directed away from Fedora to focus and fix the use on their own product or should they be discarded and treated like any other Distro out there.

Encase the answer is yes here are few more questions of top of my head.

Can Fedora project host the kickstart files that are used to create those remixes since they are in essence being sanction by Fedora by allowing them to use Fedora community resources?

Should not those remixes be at least required to provide clear easy accessible and documentation on how those remixes deviate from Fedora?
( As is being done with the Omega remix [2][3] )

Should not those remixes be at least required to provide clear easy accessible download statistic compatible with how Fedora does it?

Should not the 3rd party components being used in the remix have the necessary infrastructure for abrt to be in place so automatic reports can be filed where they belong?

Does there not need to be in place some kind of mechanism that generally checks if it's Fedora and or registers which remix it is ( encase it's not Fedora )for updating/bug reporting etc. ( yum/abrt remix tag of some sort which remixes get after registration? ) For usage and usability research/measurement purposes.

Encase the answer is no here are few more questions of top of my head.

Hows the best way to enforce such policy?

Regardless if answer is yes or no the one question remains..

Are we gathering any kind of statistic on how many reports are being filed against components in bugzilla which are claimed to be against bits we ship but have turned out to be not like bugs in another distros as was the case with bug 588930 to see how much of our resources are being abused?

Regards
         JBG

[1] http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2010-October/094830.html
[2] http://omega.dgplug.org/README.txt
[3] http://omega.dgplug.org/13/Live/kickstart/omega-13-live.ks