directions in Fedora desktop project

[Thilo Pfennig]

Matthew Miller schrieb:
> On Wed, Nov 29, 2006 at 01:17:57PM +0100, Thilo Pfennig wrote:
>   
>> But the wiki is not. And as summit is over no irc contributions. I know
>> that I may post emails to most fedora lists, but thats not much. I can
>> also do this on every open mailing lists for any proprietary software.
>>     
>
> Sign the CLA.
>   
So everybody in the world should sign the CLA and give Red Hat
non-exclusive rights to do with the content what they want? I would not
use a license if this would be my direction. In fact if we do this with
software (do all software developers have signed the CLA?) this would in
fact mean that Red Hat has the choice to relicense every bit that is
contributed and distribute it proprietary. You mighth say: They will
not. But as Red Hat does not trust me as a free man if I do not sign a
CLA, why should I trust Red Hat?

In my opinion free software and free content should be based on two
components:
 1) free licenses
 2) free communties

And they should never ever try to enhance the licenses in order to give
one party (in this case Red Hat) more control than anybody else.

Also think about that: If I would like to contribute to lets say 50
projects (which may in fact he case on my part) like Apache.org,
Wikipedia.org, etc.etc. - does it make sense to sign 50+ license
agreements only to give one party more rights than I have?

Sorry, but if this point is not going to be changed I rather leave
Fedora and rather fight its distribution, because it restricts the
rights of its users and goes a path that goes away from the freedom that
made free software great.

Fedora sees the world from the view of its own organisational problems,
but the future of free software should be free contribution. A
distributions should be there for the free software, the developers and
the users and not the other way round: the users, software and
developers must follow the rule oif a distribution.

For me it is ok if Fedora REALLY wants to go the path and then I will
not bother any more, but I want to make that clear for me of this is
what the directions really are going to be. I am involved in many
projects and I rather invest my time in real free software projects ,
then, although I sure would love to hear from somebody that things
indeed will change, because so far I like much of Fedora.


Thilo

-- 
Thilo Pfennig
PfennigSolutions - Wiki-Systeme
http://www.pfennigsolutions.de/