Why is Fedora not a Free GNU/Linux distributions?

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Jul 13, 2008, "Arthur Pemberton" <pemboa at gmail.com> wrote:

> How is it that Fedora is not on this list?
> http://www.gnu.org/links/links.html#FreeGNULinuxDistributions

> gNewsSense just recently came around and they are on the list. What's
> up with that?

Although there is non-Free Software included in Fedora, AFAIK the most
serious issue is a matter of policy ("non-Free Software is
acceptable"; "shipping these non-Free bits are not bugs that need
fixing right away") rather than the actual presence of non-Free
Software.  If the right policies were in place, given enough manpower,
all non-Free Software would be eventually shoved out of Fedora.  With
the current policies, more and more non-Free Software is being
welcomed into Fedora.

See also:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/FedoraFreedom
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=450492
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=450491

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
FSFLA Board Member       ¡Sé Libre! => http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}