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

[Matthew Miller]

On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 11:35:40AM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
> > From the Fedora perspective, there are users who have Fedora who also want
> > to use the Nvidia blob, and your proposal is to enable them. It makes sense,
> > in the sense that you are working to solve Fedora problems, where you have
> > some influence. "Fedora supports Nvidia" doesn't fly though, and regardless
> > of the language you use or implementation details like shipping metadata
> > instead of binaries, that *is* the perceived message of your proposal.
> A small but important clarification here.  In the proposal, Fedora
> would not ship binaries and would not ship metadata.  It would not
> ship anything related to a 3rd party repository other than knowing the
> web-accessible location of a repository.  It is, in effect anyway, the
> equivalent of doing a "google: nvidia linux repository" in a software
> installer.
> I'm not elaborating on the broader story, but I did want to clarify
> the technical details.  Fedora is not shipping anything in this
> proposal.

Pedantic but (maybe) important distinction: the idea would be to prepopulate
(in some way or another) the software installer application with _specific_
3rd party repositories (in the mockup, Adobe, Dropbox, Google, Nvidia, and
Steam) -- akin more to having the default Fedora bookmarks include the
download pages at those companies than to a Google search. Or am I
misunderstanding?



-- 
Matthew Miller    --   Fedora Project    --    <mattdm at fedoraproject.org>