[Fedora Board issue tracker] #182: GNOME 3.12 pushes Google and other commercial, non-FOSS "apps" at users

[Eric H. Christensen]

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On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 11:29:32AM -0400, Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 11:07:45AM -0400, Eric H. Christensen wrote:
> > So...  hmmm... Very good questions here.  My gut tells me that
> > Wordpress.com is okay (built on the open source Wordpress), Etherpad is
> > good, I believe there is a commercial hosting of OwnCloud somewhere.
> > > Would lwn.net be considered a non-free web service?
> > I thin kthat this, and similar, sites would be okay since they forward our
> > cause to FOSS. There is no UI (no service provided which appears to be the
> > purpose of the webapps in GNOME) so it more of a consumable and not SaaS.
> 
> What about sites that are not open source but promote open content? Flickr
> comes to mind as a big Creative Commons backer. And Bandcamp. Or, Stack
> Exchange — all content is CC-BY-SA. And, of course, there's GitHub.

And that is exactly the problem with adding these webapps (this and what Smooge said).  If I'm going to package up a piece of software for Fedora there is a very basic list of requirements that it must meet to be considered.  Mostly this is what license is the code (and, you know, does it build correctly).  To extend that to, say, Flickr would be an interesting process.  If we judged it as we do software then I'd say that it does not meet the criteria for inclusion because it's not licensed appropriately.  To flip this around, we wouldn't bar Shotwell if the contents (photos taken after installation) weren't licensed copyleft.  We clearly use FOSS every day to create non-FOSS content.  I don't think one can judge software based on the content but rather its license and its ability to be redistributed (does this apply to webapps?).

- -- Eric

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Eric "Sparks" Christensen
Fedora Project

sparks at fedoraproject.org - sparks at redhat.com
097C 82C3 52DF C64A 50C2  E3A3 8076 ABDE 024B B3D1
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