Fedora - DELL ?

[James Wilkinson]

Arthur Pemberton wrote:
> In light of the small possiblity of Dell having Linux sold , en masse
> on desktops and laptops, is Fedora prepared to make dell some kind of
> mutally beneficial offer? Or is the Fedora community decidedly not for
> the demographic of Dell buyers?

Note that we have a Dell employee on the Fedora Project Board...
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MattDomsch . There have been a few
questions asked on the Fedora Development list about what might be
necessary.

As I understand it, even without Fedora Project approval Dell would be
allowed to install and sell whatever strict subset of Fedora they chose
on their systems. (In other words, they don't have to install all the
Fedora packages, but everything they install would have to come from
Fedora RPMs).

I imagine that if Dell wanted to add custom Dell branding (for example,
to the Grub splash screen), something might be worked out -- it would be
little different to the existing situation (currently we have
Fedora-only branding there).

If Dell wanted to provide custom packages to support their hardware, was
prepared to take them through Fedora QA (so they got into Fedora
repositories), and licensed them appropriately, there would certainly be
no barrier to that -- there already is a lot of code in Fedora that has
come from similar sources. "Appropriately", of course, would mean "a
suitable Open Source or Free Software License", and that means that you
would be allowed to use them on other manufacturers' hardware (or modify
them to work on other manufacturers' hardware).

The big potential problem I could see would be if Dell wanted to install
closed-source software on their systems. I would expect and strongly
hope that Fedora would *not* allow the use of their trademark under such
situations -- it would be contrary to Fedora's Core Principles
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Objectives. Under such circumstances, Dell
could create their own Fedora-derived distribution (but not call it
Fedora), or (much more likely) go to Ubuntu, SuSE or Linspire.

James.
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