Fedora not "free" enough for GNU?

[Alan Cox]

On Fri, Sep 19, 2008 at 08:21:04PM +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> 1 is a serious concern as well legally. Linux kernel now has a framework 
> to support this.
> 
> http://lwn.net/Articles/294675/

As a note historically we used to ship a signed set of ISDN code that was
approved. You could change it but then it became unapproved and not permitted
in some countries.

The approvals was basically a racket to make the phone companies money (by
claiming that non approved software might bring down the exchanges etc).
Once government got its new war on abstract nouns (terrorism this time) it
didn't take very long after it was observed that "if it isn't robust enough
to handle arbitary faulty ISDN stacks then terrorists can bring down the
phone exchange before setting off a bomb" before that stopped being a credible
telco story and scam.

The Java issue is similar. Sun really want 'Java' to mean Sun Java compatible
in all respects and passing the test suite. What they never seemed to grasp (or
I suspect didn't at the time want to admit) was that nobody really minded that
but instead wanted to build interesting things and change the code around and
didn't care if it was called something else.

Alan