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

[Miloslav Trmač]

2014-04-21 19:07 GMT+02:00 Haïkel Guémar <hguemar at fedoraproject.org>:

> Le 21/04/2014 18:37, Stephen Gallagher a écrit :
>
>  I spoke too strongly there, I think. We do however give a *very*
>> strong impression that using non-FOSS solutions for anything at all is
>> unwelcome at best. Consider the recent discussions around GNOME
>> Software where we have
>> 1) Forbidden it from automatically looking up software from non-Fedora
>> repositories, even FOSS ones
>> 2) Asserted that it must consider web apps (either FOSS or not) to be
>> second-class citizens (and call it out as such)
>>
>>  They actually are second-class citizens, we can't fix proprietary apps
> as we actually do with FOSS applications.
>

That's not actually *exclusive* to proprietary applications; there seem to
be quite a few Fedora packages where the maintainer can, or does, only
forward bug reports upstream without trying to fix the code.  *In
theory*there's a difference, *in
practice* there isn't.

But if we were to consider them first-class citizens, without the editors
> cooperation, we would be bind to their willing which is against our mission
> statement.
> Unlike CentOS, we can't provide a stable base suitable to proprietary SW
> editors, all we can do is best effort.


This is not true: the OS, not the applications, has the authority to define
what is a stable base for applications to rely on, and the OS even has
technical capability (via SELinux permissions or (nm -D) checks within
installers) to enforce that they don't rely on anything else.  Yes, we
would have to commit to a set of useful stable ABIs; but that's not the
same as freezing every interface in the system.  And useful stable ABIs
would be *equally beneficial* for the open-source projects, ensuring that
the two-sided market of users/programmers is not losing programs just
because somebody decided an API needs to be "improved".
    Mirek
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