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

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Mon, Apr 21, 2014 at 12:37:57 -0400,
   Stephen Gallagher <sgallagh at redhat.com> wrote:
>
>I don't think it's unreasonable for us to allow them to use Chrome
>from the Google repository. I don't think it's unreasonable to allow
>them to use Steam from the Valve repository. Device drivers get into
>hazy territory, but I think it's a conversation worth having.

I think there is a difference between allow and promote.

I would be especially wary of promoting something like steam without 
some strong warnings as steam is going to be doing some amount of spying 
on you to enforce their DRM and is going to be significantly modifying 
the graphics system and breakage in that area is not going to be 
supportable by Fedora.

>But I think that trying to actively discourage (read: prevent) users
>from installing such software is harmful to our Mission of advancing
>Free Software. In my view, it's okay to occasionally embrace
>closed-source as a means to expose more people to open-source. Failing
>to do so has a tendency to leave us labeled as zealots, which are
>often ignored.

Does Fedora need to be that gateway OS? Maybe Ubuntu would be a better 
intermediate step?