Free software analysis

Fedora Free Software Analysis

Fedora as it currently stands has guidelines which only accept Free or open source software. The differences in licenses between what FSF considers Free software the OSI approved list of open source licenses are very limited currently to the reciprocal license (which is not a license under which we ship any Fedora software, and the OSI is reconsidering it anyway), few other licenses and we would gain better credibility, community support by changing our packaging guidelines to only allow Free software as defined by the FSF. We would gain by explicitly declaring what we already follow in our strong commitment to Free software.

RahulSundaram has brought up this earlier in the now defunct Fedora Advisors group and MichaelTiemann intiated a discussion in Fedora Advisory Board regarding this.

Current Status

Our licensing audit of Fedora Core is complete and several modifications have been made to ensure that we are compliant with the licensing guidelines.

Fedora Extras repository already had appropriate license checks made during the review process for every package before it was allowed into the repository. We are continuing through a licensing audit of Fedora Extras packages as cross verification after the merge of core and extras in Fedora 7. The whole of Fedora should only be Free software already at this point however.

FSF Responses

• http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FreeSoftwareAnalysis/FSF

References

• http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=07/03/01/1646249 - Linux.com article on this.
• http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing
• http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/LicenseAuditRecords
• http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/CdrecordAlternatives
• Blaming Fedora - http://lwn.net/Articles/230042/
• Resisting the binary blob - http://lwn.net/Articles/209175/
• The Fedora Extras license audit - http://lwn.net/Articles/218037/
• Standardize license tags to help in auditing and keeping track of licenses included in a better fashion - http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/GuidelinesTodo
• Slashdot post supporting this idea - http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=194333&cid=15936443