Why is Fedora not a Free GNU/Linux distributions?

[Rahul Sundaram]

Jonathan Roberts wrote:
>>        My opinion is that it's political in nature.  GNU doesn't like Red
>> Hat and, by extension, anything that Red Hat contributes to.  OC, I have
>> absolutely no proof nor reason for this opinion.  But it's a gut feel.
> 
> Not the case.

Right.

Many of the GNU projects including GCC, glibc, coreutils etc is either 
maintained by Red Hat or has significant Red Hat contributors.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RedHatContributions

It is true however that FSF is somewhat reluctant to endorse major 
distributions without explicit policy and I think that's understandable. 
However FSF's policy itself towards some of more ancillary things in a 
distribution such as content, documentation and firmware was earlier 
unclear and that has been getting fixed now. See below.

> The situation with Fedora and the FSF is, as I understand it:
> 
>  * Fedora allows some non-free firmware in the distribution, the
> policy under which this is allowed was linked to in a previous message
> in this thread
>  * The FSF will not give "free" status to any distribution that
> explicitly allows non-free firmware in it
>  * Fedora people have been in touch to discuss this with them, and
> progress has been made.
> 
> Rahul Sundaram is the one who's worked on this, and I'm sure he knows
> the details so perhaps he might post so we're crystal clear :)

I described the last status at

http://lwn.net/Articles/282771/

Meanwhile David Woodhouse has been working on patches to make it 
possible to separate the firmware that is currently inside the kernel.

http://lwn.net/Articles/284932/

Aside for the legal and philosophical issues, this has several other 
practical advantages and there is a kernel summit discussion in the 
agenda. If and when that gets done, end users would be able to exclude 
the firmware completely and it would also be possible to create a 
separate spin more targeted towards meeting FSF's criteria

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/FedoraFreedom

Rahul