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

[Josh Boyer]

On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 11:51 AM, Robert Mayr
<robyduck at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> 2014/1/22 Josh Boyer <jwboyer at fedoraproject.org>:
>> On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 11:27 AM, Pete Travis <lists at petetravis.com> wrote:
>>> From the Fedora perspective, there are users who have Fedora who also want
>>> to use the Nvidia blob, and your proposal is to enable them. It makes sense,
>>> in the sense that you are working to solve Fedora problems, where you have
>>> some influence. "Fedora supports Nvidia" doesn't fly though, and regardless
>>> of the language you use or implementation details like shipping metadata
>>> instead of binaries, that *is* the perceived message of your proposal.
>>
>> A small but important clarification here.  In the proposal, Fedora
>> would not ship binaries and would not ship metadata.  It would not
>> ship anything related to a 3rd party repository other than knowing the
>> web-accessible location of a repository.  It is, in effect anyway, the
>> equivalent of doing a "google: nvidia linux repository" in a software
>> installer.
>
> Sure, but the message you give is: hey, there are these listed FOSS
> solutions for what you're searching for, but I suggest you the 3d
> party software, just click here!
> Sorry but I really don't want to see something like this on Fedora. Do
> we want to throw away what for 10 years has been a basic feature of
> our OS?

As I said, I wasn't elaborating on the wider picture.  I'm just
correcting misconceptions of the proposal as I see them.

josh