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

[Przemek Klosowski]

On 04/21/2014 01:27 PM, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
>
 > On 04/21/2014 01:07 PM, Haïkel Guémar wrote:
 >
 > We should think on how we could improve collaboration with
 > third-party repos, fedmsg/copr might be part of the technical
 > solution. How about a Fedora Partnership Program ? We could open up
 > at a certain extent our infrastructure and collaborate with software
 >  editors to make sure that their products have some support in
 > Fedora.
 >
 >
 > I love this idea and I think we should probably start another thread
 > on it when this one starts to die down, assuming that the general
 > sense is that the community wants to improve our
 > third-party/non-FOSS relationships.

The choices we make are determined by the possibilities we are presented 
with. While we all agree that it's neither possible nor desirable to 
prevent installation of whatever tools the end user wants, the Freedom 
absolutists would like to put up a barrier against non-Free software, or 
at least want Fedora to abstain from helping. I personally prefer that 
choice to be given to the users, who should be able to indicate what 
they want on their systems.

Now, these abstract choices take shape during software installation, so 
it seems to me that they should be entered as user preferences in the 
software installer to shape the results of software search. In other 
words, ask the user what they want to see, and then let them choose from 
the results.

We've discussed several such values-based choices:

- the license conditions (Free vs. encumbered vs. non-Free and commercial)

- tolerance for gritty old commandline tools vs. polished apps only

- choice between full functionality vs. small size and/or speed

I think they all can be seen as user preferences in the software 
installer discovery process, making the installer central to how the 
resulting system is put together. This is consistent with how Droid and 
iOS make software 'stores' and installation a central point of 
interaction for configuring their systems.


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