Goodbye, Fedora

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Feb 23, 2007, Thomas M Steenholdt <tmus at tmus.dk> wrote:

> Amusing or not, it does confirm that our current policy of keeping all
> the proprietary stuff away from Fedora, is really for the best.

Just a small clarification.  Patent-encumbered doesn't mean
proprietary.  Many of the multi-media packages that are kept out of
Fedora *are* Free Software, but they can't be shipped from the US
because of software patents.

Fedora actually helps weaken the software patents system by rejecting
even such Free Software packages, and promoting Free Software
implementations of Free Standards instead.  A wise use of the fifth
freedom: http://www.fsfla.org/?q=en/node/139#1

But if it weren't for legal, patent-related reasons, Fedora could
include such packages without breaking its vow to not ship non-Free
Software (other than policy allowing for non-Free firmware).

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
FSF Latin America Board Member         http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}