[Fedora-packaging] Proposal to reduce anti-bundling requirements

Adam Williamson adamwill at fedoraproject.org
Thu Sep 10 18:02:31 UTC 2015


On Thu, 2015-09-10 at 12:58 -0400, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
> On Thu, 2015-09-10 at 11:02 -0500, Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
> <snip>
> > > > > > > "SG" == Stephen Gallagher <sgallagh at redhat.com> writes:
> > SG> If they can't get that software from Fedora, they *will* get it
> > from
> > SG> another source (or use a different OS that doesn't get in their
> > SG> way).
> > 
> > Exactly.  Let's ship binary drivers.
> > 
> > I know that's something of a straw man, but my point is that we
> > must
> > have some principles, and must work with upstreams to attempt to
> > get
> > them to at least understand those principles.  And we shouldn't
> > give
> > up
> > on that just because someone wants some program which is easily
> > provided
> > by a copr anyway.
> > 
> 
> 
> Binary drivers are a different problem. We don't ship those because
> there are *legal* concerns preventing it.

Kernel modules are kind of a grey area because there are differing
opinions on their legality in re the GPL, but in general terms, it's
not correct to say we don't include non-free software for *legal*
reasons. There are plenty of non-free-but-legally-redistributable
things, e.g. Flash. We have always been clear that we disallow non-
free software unconditionally for *philosophical*, not *legal*,
reasons.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net




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