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

[Adam Williamson]

On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 10:13 -0500, Christian Schaller wrote:

> > The above statement implies that you or your team communicates with NVIDIA in
> > the context of business needs and customer impact, where it pays to listen.
> > Has anyone discussed our goals and values with them? Opening the driver
> > sources would be excellent but admittedly a hard sell, but shipping them in
> > a sane repo instead of a blob that breaks with kernel updates is more
> > appealing, and a marketable feature. The changes to xorg bits done by their
> > installer isn't great either. I would be interested to hear of any
> > discussions with OEMs along these lines.
> 
> Yes, we have. And they are also acutely aware that we are developing Nouveau because
> we don't agree with their current policy of shipping a closed source driver. 
> Convincing them that it would be worthwhile for them to provide a repository is
> part of this proposal, and that we would make it available through our SoftwareApp
> if they do is a part how I hope to make this more tempting for them to bother with.

And how would that make AMD feel?

After several years of fairly concerted effort, the F/OSS community
managed to convince AMD that committing to F/OSS driver development was
worthwhile, partly (I know not *entirely*) through the 'stick' of major
distros not shipping its proprietary driver.

How does it look if we then turn around and say to their largest
competitor "oh, hey, actually, we'll help you ship your binaries, don't
sweat it"? Are they going to feel good about their work with us (Fedora)
and their commitment to F/OSS?
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
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