Infinite Freedom??? -- segment them in the RPM hierarchy (but that's all)

Rahul Sundaram sundaram at fedoraproject.org
Tue Jun 19 15:39:15 UTC 2007


Bryan J. Smith wrote:

> 
> As far as adding an option to checkbox "exclude" all non-free[dom]
> components, I'll leave it to the Anaconda, YUM, et. al. maintainers to
> discuss the technical feasibility of such.  Frankly, I think just
> segmenting those components into a Non-Free tier in the RPM hierarchy
> would do everything needed.  Debian does this fairly well (although far
> from perfect).

The line to draw is difficult to determine. Would that include 
documentation, fonts, images etc?

> Since they are still 100% redistributable, that solves the
> indemnification issues, which should _always_ be the focus of Fedora
> IMPO.  Things that aren't should be, for the same reason.

Everything is 100% redistributable already and will always be.

> P.S.  Congrats to the Fedora team for putting forth the efforts that
> have now allowed Red Hat to reach level 4 in the Common Criteria with
> RBAC and other capabilities.  People have been lambasting SELinux, and
> Red Hat, for a long time.  But it's the community efforts, like those in
> Fedora, that made it largely possible.

Absolutely.  RHEL now has the highest possible security level 
certification that any operating system ever has got out of the box 
without the need for creating a separate fork. Without technologies like 
SELinux and the ability of a open community to merge these very 
disruptive changes fairly well that would be pretty much impossible.

Rahul




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