advertisement in packaged software (e.g. Firefox)

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 03:36:00PM +0100, Kai Engert wrote:
> On Mi, 2014-02-12 at 10:46 +0100, Kai Engert wrote: 
> > Do the Fedora guidelines allow packaging of software that will show
> > advertisement to the user?
> > 
> > Are there any existing packages that already do that?
> 
> There are multiple open questions that need answers. I wanted to get the
> first question answered first, but since the discussion has already
> started to discuss consequences, let's get the questions and potential
> consequence spelled out and discussed separately.
> 
> This discussion is trigged by http://lwn.net/Articles/585577/
> 
> Question (1) 
> 
> Are we allowed to ship software in Fedora that dynamically loads
> advertisements from the web and shows them to users?

I think "allowed" is probably the wrong term to use here. Fedora
packaging rules on what is allowed to be included have pretty much
focused on legality of packages. ie licensing, trademarks, patents,
etc. The question of whether advertisements are "allowed" is starting
to venture into the grounds of philosophy. There's probably also a
privacy question to answer here too. To me though, those aren't
criteria for forbidding software from Fedora entirely, but are
relevant when choosing whether a piece of software is set as the
default option installed for users.

Regards,
Daniel
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