Re: the Fedora filters

["Tom \"spot\" Callaway" <tcallawa redhat com>]

On Tue, 2008-03-18 at 16:42 -0700, Karsten 'quaid' Wade wrote:
> A community has a set of filters, spoken or unspoken, that are
> used to judge various matters, such as entrance into the 
> community, exit from the community, interaction of ideas, etc.  A
> common mistake is to assume that "all open source communities
> share values and filters."  In the end, we are all as different
> as all communities can be from one another.
> 
> In Fedora we have such filtering, with priority given to values
> and other considerations, which we use when deciding if a package
> comes in to the community, what we'll ship in the distribution,
> how we route packets, etc.
> 
> When making decisions that involve philosophy and practicality,
> what is the Fedora filter?  Based on what I've seen around here,
> and on how I've seen decisions tend to be made, here is a first
> poke at ordering our filter.  What is strange to me is that
> sometimes I feel as if we apply this filter in _reverse_, such as
> with IT decisions.  Is that what we want?  Do different parts of
> the Project apply the filters differently?
> 
> These decision filters are in order of usage/importance.  Please
> discuss:

I think these need some tweaking, here is how my thought process goes:

=           We cannot break US laws                =
   Software patents and the DMCA are lame, 
   but as long as Red Hat is a US company, 
   we have to play by the rules. This means
   respecting trademarks and copyright.

==           Free Software is best                      ==
   We prefer our software to be 100% free.
   Free as in FSF.

===           Open Source is almost as good as Free           ===
   In the few cases where something is OSI-approved
   but not FSF Free, we'll take it, but we'll work to
   free it. (Note: The only item that currently hits this
   filter is the Artistic 1.0 license)

====               Educating and changing the world                  ====
			
=====                   Usability, Pragmatism                       =====

======            Open Community Projects are Better               ======

=======                 Budget and Resources                      =======

~spot