[Ambassadors] Fedora project

[Rahul Sundaram]

inode0 wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 12:15 PM, Rahul Sundaram
> <sundaram at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>> Alejandro Acosta wrote:
>>> I saw the words "open source" a lot along many Fedora presentations, but
>>> my doubts still remain. Do we have any policy regarding Open Source and/or
>>> Free Software?  It is going to be hard to me to debate about freedom against
>>> RMS so I would prefer only to talk about our project, but stating clearly
>>> what we stand for.
>> In the main documents and webpages, we have traditionally preferred to use
>> free and open source or FOSS as a term to encompass both movements.
> 
> Understandable and seems fairly common among large distributions. This
> term has always grated on me in the way saying squares and rectangles
> would. If you are talking about squares say squares, if you are
> talking about squares and rectangles just say rectangles. (No offense
> to those who see a much bigger difference here. I see a bigger
> difference too.)

FYI, RMS/FSF considers FOSS a acceptable term. In practice, it makes no 
difference in Fedora.

> Out of curiosity, are there any components of Fedora that are Open
> Source but not Free Software?

In terms of licenses, there are very few differences. Fedora has 
inherited a number of Perl components that are under Artistic License 1 
which FSF considers potentially non-free as per

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html#GPLIncompatibleLicenses

Tom Callaway talked with OSI and they have deprecated the license too as 
stated in

http://opensource.org/licenses/artistic-license-1.0.php

While Fedora has for a while not accepted new software under this 
license, there has been a long term effort to get existing components 
relicensed which has been successful to a large extend. That effort is 
coming to a close in Fedora 10

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Artistic1Removal

After this effort is complete, there would be zero disparities.

Rahul