a legal way to include 3rd party repositories in fedora?

Valent Turkovic valent.turkovic at gmail.com
Wed Jul 4 14:05:43 UTC 2007


On Wed, 2007-07-04 at 13:04 +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> It is not possible for Fedora to include SW 
> * which would violate applicable laws (E.g. US patent laws)
> * whose licenses impose restrictions which violate Fedora's policies
> on OSS.

Are your hands completely tied? 

I live and work by the moto "Where there is will there is a way."
Meaning that when you want to do something you find a way to do so.

So is this a case that Fedora Board and fedora devels don't see any
importance to pursue this issue?

I believe that if the decision was made to work this out, and if you put
some of your smartest people to work on this together with lawyers that
then a solution would be found.

I understand that you have legal boundaries but there are legal
mechanics that allow you to do some things even if that looks hard from
your point of view.

I'm not saying that you should just drop everything you are doing right
now and focus all of your attention to solving this issue. I don't
believe that is that crucial enough - but it would be nice if it was
resolved.

There are much  important thing that Fedora needs and succeeds in doing
with each new version.

But you also have to be realistic and acknowledge that people can't use
Fedora Desktop effectively with out at least few "forbidden fruits" :)

So if users have a real need to use them it would be nice to make it as
easy as possible for users that want "forbidden items" to use them
themselves - of course considering your legal boundaries.



> This does NOT mean it is NOT possible to ship non-GPL'ed SW nor codecs
> as part of Fedora. 

Can you please expand on this just a bit?




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