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

[Paul W. Frields]

On Sat, Jan 25, 2014 at 11:08:20PM -0500, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 4:10 PM, Josh Boyer  wrote:
> 
> > Your wiki search inspired me.  I did one of my own.  I found pages
> > that have existed since 2008 that mention 3rd party repositories:
> >
> > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Third_party_repositories
> >
> > We also have one that explicitly tells you how to install Adobe flash,
> > which is non-free software:
> >
> > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Flash (created in 2011)
> >
> 
> I have moved info out of both these pages and added references so that
> users can still find the info but we don't document them directly in the
> wiki anymore.   I have also changed the note at
> 
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Help:Wiki_rules_and_etiquette#Do_not_provide_details_of_forbidden_items

I don't think this is acceptable.  There is a lot of work that's gone
into that page over several years.  It's the first page that comes up
from a Google search.  Wasting that energy and knowledge is just
annoying to contributors and users.  My recollection is there were
debates about this page back when it was started, and the community
reached a liveable balance with its content.  Undoing that now seems
disingenuous or even obfuscatory, and not in the spirit of a community
maintained wiki.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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