Fedora Tracker: Part Deux

[Jef Spaleta]

Matt H wrote:
> You mentioned that this project is not a part of Red Hat or the 
> Fedora Steering Committee. However, as this becomes more well-known >
and widely used, will you consider proposing it become part of The >
Fedora Project directly; much like The Fedora Docs Project and 
> similar? Or at least host it at fedora.redhat.com?

This is going to be very very tough to do I think. For the same reasons
the tracker might best be hosted outside the US, the tracker might not
be able to be incorporated into the official project as hosted and
managed by Red Hat.    Right now, I'm working under the assumption that
incorporating anything similar to this tracker idea into the main fedora
project site is not something Red Hat can do without taking on a finite
amount of legal risk, due to the DMCA, because of links to 3rd party
repositories containing patent and copyright encumbered software that is
not legally redistributable in the US. It's not even clear the official
site can even link to a tracker due to the DMCA issues without some
risk.

Now we can all grumble about how crappy the DMCA is..and make noises
about fighting it somehow. It's a crappy situation, and as much as I
want to see functionality like this rolled into the red hat hosted
fedora site, I'm not going to demand that Red Hat deliberately and
knowingly break a US law. If Red Hat or any US individual for that
matter wants to commit an act of civil disobedience by breaking a law
they don't agree with its their choice to do so, but its not something
anyone can demand another person or entity to do.   If US citizens on
this list want to take on the legal liability and provide mirrors of the
tracker, that's their decision, and would make for an interesting
example of organized protest but I'm not going to demand that anyone
knowingly break a law.

If I were going to demand anything, i would demand that 3rd party
repository creators make at least a token effort split the non-US and US
redistributable packages into separate repositories. It seems completely
irrational to me, to be providing additional packages for a US based
Fedora Core, and not making an effort to work around the legal problems
that Fedora Core has to live with respect to the DMCA.  I don't see ANY
search functionality being rolled into the official fedora project site
that includes searching for packages that run afoul of US patent or
copyright laws. If the official site does gain a package search feature,
I highly doubt it will return any information about packages that can't
be redistributed in the US. And at this point, that means only a few 3rd
party repos could be indexed in such an official way because they do not
make an effort to split US and non-US distributable package sets into
separate trees.  

So moving forward there is a choice to be made by the 3rd party
repository community. Do they want to make it easier for the official
project to link to them, by taking steps to work inside the
non-technical limitations such as the DMCA that the official project
must abide by. Or do they want to be completely free to package what
they want how they want, paying no heed to the legal constraints FC must
live under and thus having to always stay one Google search away from
users finding any of your packages.  There are pros and cons for both
sides of that decision. And more importantly what the widely used
end-user community tools will look like will depend on what the
consensus is in the 3rd party repo community.  There's really no point
in trying to build something like this tracker into the main site, if
most of the popular 3rd party repos can't be indexed because of the
DMCA.