D1x license

[Michael Wiktowy]

Michael A. Peters wrote:

>On Fri, 2005-04-29 at 11:50 -0400, Michael Wiktowy wrote:
>
>  
>
>>I would think that that would be for someone who wants to sell Fedora 
>>Extras CDs to worry about.
>>AFAIK, there is no charge for people accessing the Fedora Extras 
>>repository so it could happily reside there. If someone wants to extend 
>>the scope of Extras later into a commercial product, then they will have 
>>to make some adjustments and know what they are doing.
>>Not putting this in just because someone may choose to come along and 
>>try to commercialize Extras without putting any thought or work into 
>>doing so seems silly to me.
>>    
>>
>
>In this case sure - but the problem arises if you have libraries that
>other things in extras are linked against.
>
>Then the vendor has to remove the library, and rebuild any packages that
>are linked against it so that they now are not, and furthermore make
>sure nothing has been statically linked against it.
>
>This makes it a lot more work for someone who wants to sell CD/DVD sets
>- and there are some people doing it not for a profit motive, but
>because they want it to be freely and easily accessible to people
>without bandwidth and/or CD/DVD burners (or knowledge on how to burn -
>which a lot of people have trouble with).
><snip>
>Magazine distribution of Extras is probably the same way - editor isn't
>going to want to dig through what is restricted for him and what is not.
>  
>

Those are all very valid points but it comes down to a fair distribution 
of workload and availablility.

If you want to prevent something that is not commercially 
redistributable from entering Extras in the first place, you make your 
life easier, make the person trying to contribute to Extra do extra work 
and make the package much less accessible to everyone who has the 
bandwidth to handle Extras over the internet.

I have absolutely nothing against commercialization of 
updates/extras/alternative media, in fact I think that it serves a 
valuable niche. I don't think that life should be made more difficult 
for people who want to do that. However, I think that the workload 
should be biased towards the person making the profit from the workload 
and the availability be biased towards the majority.

There is a middle ground that would likely make everyone's life easier. 
Ensuring clear and consistent marking of the license type in the rpm 
package info would make non-commercial variants much easier to filter 
out with a simple script. That would maximize the availability and not 
make things too onerous for someone wanting to rebundle for profit. It 
would also entail much clearer and detailed package submission 
guidelines than exist currently. But I understand those are a work in 
progress but I am not sure who is guiding that work.

/Mike