FESCo decision on 3rd party repositories

[Josh Boyer]

Hi All,

At the FESCo meeting today, the following things were decided on 3rd
party repositories.  Some of this is specific to COPRs because those
are an odd case of 3rd party repositories.

1) COPRs can provide RPMS with .repo files in them because Red Hat is
the provider and assumes liability, but those cannot be included in
the main Fedora repos per FESCo decree.

2) COPR repos may be searched for applications to install as long as
the user is explicitly asked to enable the copr before installing
packages from them.

3) General 3rd party repositories cannot be searched or enabled due to
liability concerns.

(NOTE: "searched" in 2 and 3 was intended to cover searching by
software.  Clearly users can manually search for anything.)

4) FESCo is okay with pointing to specific free software repositories
in the same way as COPR repos if they are approved by FESCo and Fedora
Legal. They are not limited in the criteria that they can choose to
apply.

5) For non-free sofware repositories, FESCo is not changing exisiting
policy. Non-free software repositories are not allowed.  Permission to
make these discoverable via searching software would require a change
in policy from the Fedora Board.

In short, this means products can request approval of specific 3rd
party free software repositories.  If approved, they can include their
contents along with COPR repos in application searches a user does and
offer to install them with a warning that they come from a 3rd party,
non-Fedora repo.  Repositories containing non-free software cannot be
enabled by default or made discoverable through software.

josh