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

[Bill Nottingham]

Josh Boyer (jwboyer at fedoraproject.org) said: 
> FWIW, I think this seems pretty sane overall.
> 
> > Then, we just need to
> >
> > 1) get other distros involved
> > 2) work with them to define & set up the service
> > 3) work with the vendors on how to package stuff for it properly
> 
> The sticking point here will be who hosts the service.  If Fedora is
> hosting a service for vendors of non-free software to list their
> products, I don't really see how it's different semantically than
> including links to repositories they host themselves.  Yes, it solves
> the technical problem of packaging being bad for this, but it doesn't
> solve the broader "promotion of non-free software" issue that is what
> really people seem to be objecting to.
> 
> (Frankly, even if Fedora doesn't host the service and we still point
> to it, the semantics are the same in my mind.)

The point I would say is this:

If a user has already explicitly requested to be shown third-party
repositories, with the caveats that we can't support it, it could eat their
system, and so on - then at that point, attempting to restrict the types of
third-party software shown to them for reasons other than legal reasons
doesn't make sense.

I'd agree with you and Matthew that maintaining this is likely thankless
drudge-work - that's why it is (IMO) even more important to do this as a
cross-distro community effort. Share the pain!  Plus, if you get a group
tied in to handle this while vendors are still doing yum/apt repos, you
already then have a point of contact and working relationship for when you
roll out (hopefully) cross-OS packaging such as LinuxApps or other
proposals - it's a natual place to get convergence.

Bill