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

[Christian Schaller]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Matthew Garrett" <mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org>
> To: advisory-board at lists.fedoraproject.org
> Sent: Tuesday, January 21, 2014 9:19:10 PM
> Subject: Re: Proposal: Revision of policy surrounding 3rd party and	non-free software
> 
> On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 03:13:12PM -0500, Christian Schaller wrote:
> > The basic idea of the proposal is to get away from Googling being the only
> > tool we offer our users to find the software they need.
> > 
> > Of course what we could do here is build in web search functionality into
> > the Software app, so that when you search for 'pdf viewer' it queries
> > google or similar
> > for sites with repository metadata and if it finds a repository which
> > contains the 'pfd viewer' keyword it adds it to your Software app search
> > result.
> > It is a convoluted way of doing things, but since nobody objects to us
> > packaging stuff that can search for things on the web, like Firefox, I
> > guess we should be fine.
> 
> Don't be ridiculous. The distinction between a tool that exists in order
> to let users find non-free software and a general purpose tool that can
> be used by users to find non-free software is obvious.
> 
There is nothing non-free specific about what I proposed here, we have no way of knowing
if those 3rd party repositories it finds contains non-free software or not, just like you have
no way of knowing what kind of sofware a google search will find for you.

All I described was a general purpose tool for finding software.

Christian