[fab] Fedora as Free Software?

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Apr 21, 2006, seth vidal <skvidal at linux.duke.edu> wrote:

> Do we have an idea of what we would need to drop to be completely free
> software definition compliant?

Probably very little.  Although there are differences between the OSD
and the FSD, I'm not aware of any licenses that actually exercise
them.  So if we're already compliant with our own policies, we
shouldn't have to drop anything at all.

Now if we aren't...  Say, proprietary firmwares pretending to be
legitimate source files inside the kernel, or in other firmware
packages that the packaging guidelines might approve even though they
are not free software.

> What would we lose?

Nothing compared with what we'd gain.

> I guess a few rpm queries on license should work.

That's not quite enough.  There are a number of packages whose license
says Distributable, which isn't entirely clear on the licensing
terms.

Also, there's the issue of how much you trust the License field in
every one of the thousands of spec files in Fedora Core and Extras.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Secretary for FSF Latin America        http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}