Board efforts: scope, concept, and permission?

[Kevin Kofler]

Josh Boyer wrote:
> It is.  It's one step removed.  There were people actively wanting to make
> Zope/Plone work via a compat-python stack.  It went all the way to FESCo
> and got voted down.  The zope/plone users were the target audience there.
> There were people willing to do the work, all they needed was a yes from
> FESCo.  We told them no.  As Jesse has mentioned, 'status quo' won out.

I think this was just a bad decision. I complained back then and I still 
think we did the wrong thing. We should be as encompassing as legally 
possible within our Free Software ideals. Those packages eventually ended up 
in RPM Fusion anyway, like most of the stuff we refuse, so what was the 
point of preventing them from going into Fedora? Supportability concerns 
aren't going to vanish just because the package ends up in a third-party 
repository, and we have no way to prevent that.

I also think for the same reasons that we should allow acceptably-licensed 
(GPLv2 or compatible) kernel modules as external packages in Fedora, banning 
them gains us nothing and loses us hardware support we could gain without 
any moral (software freedom) compromises or legal risks.

        Kevin Kofler