FESCo decision on 3rd party repositories

[Josh Boyer]

On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 4:21 PM, Josh Boyer <jwboyer at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> 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.

The FESCo ticket documenting all of this is here:
https://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/1201

josh