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

[Josh Boyer]

On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 12:30 PM, Toshio Kuratomi <a.badger at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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).
>
> More satisfying to the people who raised objections would be to either
> change or rephrase and clarify the pieces in all the Fedora Policies that seem
> to conflict with non-libre software.  Places that I found by quickly
> searching this morning:
>
> * The Fedora Foundations: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Foundations
>   The Freedom Foundation is weighted towards free software.  It could be
>   rephrased or changed to make cooperation with non-free software more clear.
>   (Also mentioned on other pages like:
>   http://fedoraproject.org/en_GB/about-fedora#freedom)
> * Vision statement http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Vision_statement
>   Probably could work this in by promoting the collaboration element more
>   and talking about collaboration between free software and closed source
>   software.
> * The Mission Statement: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Overview
>   * [Our Mission] and [Elements of Fedora's Mission] could be rephrased to
>     show our relation to proprietary software.  Could be similar to the
>     reworking on the Vision Staement.
>   * [Our Core Values] has something interesting: "we guarantee that Fedora
>     will always be free for everyone, everywhere, to use, modify and
>     distribute"  When we think about whether pointing people to proprietary
>     software should be allowed, we tend to think about modification mostly.
>     But we probably should think about the other things mentioned here as
>     well:  Can we/do we wish to allow pointing to software which:
>     * Excludes some people?  (Ex: Not for nuclear plant operators)
>     * Excludes some usages? (Not to be used for evil)
>     * Distribution? (the third party repo is free to redistribute and they
>       give us a license to point to them but our users are not free to
>       redistribute the code that they download through that.)
> * Our Objectives: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Objectives
>   * [Creating a Free distribution] Probably mention something about people
>     being able to use proprietary software of the products we create
>   * [Objectives Outside of the Fedora Project] Need to change the bullet
>     point relahttps://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Flashting to proprietary components.

Your wiki search inspired me.  I did one of my own.  I found pages
that have existed since 2008 that mention 3rd party repositories:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Third_party_repositories

We also have one that explicitly tells you how to install Adobe flash,
which is non-free software:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Flash (created in 2011)

These are top-level wiki pages.  They are hosted on the Fedora
project's website.  There are others.

I do not doubt for a second that Fedora's objectives and principles
are to promote Free software.  However, saying that a utility that
searches for and enables specific 3rd party repositories that we
already point to on our own wiki is against the very being of Fedora
seems disingenuous at best.

josh