The Forgotten "F": A Tale of Fedora's Foundations

[Frank Ch. Eigler]

sgallagh wrote:

> [...]
> > Sometimes this goal prevents us from taking the easy way out by
> > including proprietary or patent encumbered software in Fedora, or
> > using those kinds of products in our other project work. [...]
>
> The language in this Foundation is sometimes dangerously unclear. For
> example, it pretty much explicitly forbids the use of non-free
> components in the creation of Fedora (sorry, folks: you can't use
> Photoshop to create your package icon!). 

Aren't you over-reading the quoted sentence?  ISTM one can use any
tool one wants to to produce the artifacts, as long as those artifacts
do not mandate proprietary widgets for further use.  In other words,
draw the logo with any tool - just export it in forms that FOSS can
render/edit.


> [...]
> Functional means that the Fedora community recognizes this to be the
> ultimate truth: the purpose of an operating system is to enable its
> users to accomplish the set of tasks they need to perform.
>
> The "Functional" Foundation should be placed above the other four and
> be the goal-post that we measure decisions against: "If we make this
> change, are we reducing our users' ability to work with the software
> they want/need to?". [...]

Some examples of what you're thinking about would be useful.  It's not
too hard to reduce it to absurdity with a user wanting to "work with
MSIE 8 on his workstation", or "run MacOSX Safari", or "ios angry
birds" or such; what would be your idea of an appropriate or
inappropriate Fedora response to that kind of user desire?


- FChE