Why is Fedora not a Free GNU/Linux distributions?

Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
Sun Jul 13 21:44:23 UTC 2008


Alexandre Oliva wrote:
>
>> How is it that Fedora is not on this list?
>> http://www.gnu.org/links/links.html#FreeGNULinuxDistributions
> 
>> gNewsSense just recently came around and they are on the list. What's
>> up with that?
> 
> Although there is non-Free Software included in Fedora, AFAIK the most
> serious issue is a matter of policy ("non-Free Software is
> acceptable"; "shipping these non-Free bits are not bugs that need
> fixing right away") rather than the actual presence of non-Free
> Software.  If the right policies were in place, given enough manpower,
> all non-Free Software would be eventually shoved out of Fedora.  With
> the current policies, more and more non-Free Software is being
> welcomed into Fedora.

Errr... "right policies" isn't exactly a valid description.  I'd call it 
misguided or cultish instead.

I ran across a surprisingly perceptive description of the confusion of 
GPL restrictions with freedom here:
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/08/1832255&from=rss.

-- 
   Les Mikesell  (who likes his tivo...)
    lesmikesell at gmail.com




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