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

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 12:56:37PM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 12:30 PM, Toshio Kuratomi <a.badger at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > Talking with jwb on IRC, it seems that the intention of this is not to
> > overrule FESCo but to get a Board change of policy on libre software.
> 
> Um... that's oddly worded and not what I thought the result of our
> conversation was.  I'm honestly not even sure what you mean by "change
> of policy on libre software."  I don't think anyone is looking to
> somehow exclude libre software or promote non-free software over libre
> software.
> 
Hmmm... Yeah maybe oddly worded.  How about, "the intention of this is not
to overrule FESCo but to get a Board change of policy on non-libre software"
?  I wrote it the other way thinking of it as being a change to how we
balance the scales of promoting libre software vs collaborating with
non-libre software but as you say, it's not really about devaluing libre
software as much as increasing the value of collaborating with non-libre
software sources.


> > Taking that as a basis to start this conversation, most of this policy
> > should go to FESCo to decide as it came up just a few months ago and
> > resulted in this FESCo policy:
> > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Third_Party_Repository_Policy
> 
> Yeah, that was the result of Christian making this this request to
> FESCo.  So I'm confused why you think it should go _back_ to FESCo,
> when FESCo clearly said non-libre software repositories were something
> that would need to be discussed by the Board.
> 
Christian's proposal contains more than just a question of whether the Board
okays inclusion of pointers to non-libre software.  As pointed out in the
last paragraph of my previous message, it's also a proposal for the third
party repository rules themselves (some of which conflict with FESCo's
current policy).

I think that portion of the proposal should go to FESCo to decide.  But
the Board haas to weigh in on the question of whether pointing to non-libre
software should be allowed at all before that.

Unless what Christian wants is to have the Board overrule the FESCo policy.
In which case we should be having a different discussion here.

> >
> > In FESCo's meeting where we discussed this[1]_, we decided that the Board's
> > previously established position(s) of Fedora's relationship to Free Software
> > would conflict with our making it easy to search for non-free software.
> > Therefore we would need the Board to change that relationship before we
> > could consider policy allowing non-libre repositories.
> >
> > At minimum, we'd probbaly need the Board to simply say that it was okay for
> > us to allow searching and pointing to non-free software in the same manner
> > as we allow for COPR repos (see the existing FESCo policy for the details).
> 
> As I understand things, this is all that is being requested.  I'm sure
> Christian will correct me if I've misunderstood.
> 
Cool.  Then you and I are on the same page, at least.

-Toshio
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