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

[Alec Leamas]

On 4/24/14, Christian Schaller <cschalle at redhat.com> wrote:

> So decisions need to be general to allow us to look for a variety of options
> to fulfill them. Lets say Fedora decided we want to make it
> easier for our users to get more multimedia codecs. We would not get the
> go ahead from legal to include a repository which contains ffmpeg for
> instance, but legal would probably be perfectly fine with including a
> repository containing the Cisco H264 package or the Fluendo Mp3 plugin.
Which, long story short, isn't really what users want (they want all
that codecs).

>
> So in the end this is not a legal question which needs the involvement
> of the lawyers at this point, but a question of the overall goals and values
>  of Fedora, and how we best achieve those goals and values.
>
> Basically we first need to agree on the 'design' before distracting
> ourselves
> with 'implementation'.

Agreed. And as far as I can see, the current design with  the Fedora
core repos + rpmfusion  + COPR add-ons is a good design, given that US
law is applicable to core Fedora and COPR.

That said, these add-ons should IMHO be a fundamental part of the
vision. To lijmit our thought to a user with just Fedora repos is,
well, to limit our thoughts. Let's recognize the fact that users have
needs which in many cases will make them use additional repos. We do
provide a lot of hooks for this, but could be better. Partly, it's a
question how we present things.

Personally, I think Fedora core repos + rpmfusion should be a one-stop
shop for most things. There's some work to be done on the rpmfusion
side to for this, though.