Fedora free? [LWN.net]

Fedora free?

Posted Apr 12, 2007 18:30 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
In reply to: Fedora free? by bcs
Parent article: Blaming Fedora

When I asked about FSF's position, RMS claimed that he is willing to ignore the issue of sourceless firmware within the kernel and FSF site already lists several distributions as Free even though they include such firmware

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FreeSoftwareAnalysis/FSF

So a FSF licensing compliance engineer pointing it out as a example of Fedora not reaching it's goal is puzzling. Meanwhile Fedora project is waiting on FSF to go through the OSI licenses that are important to Fedora as requested by RMS earlier and inform us whether they are considered Free software licenses or not.

If you are willing to speed up that process drop me a mail @fedoraproject.org

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Fedora free?

Posted Apr 14, 2007 11:48 UTC (Sat) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]

Now that is interesting! I wonder what, then, is the reason that the FSF will not endorse Debian in this day and age!

Fedora free?

Posted Apr 14, 2007 18:26 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Debian hosts and supports a non-free repository while technically unofficial is part of Debian infrastructure and is maintained by Debian developers. FSF wants that to be separated out entirely and wants Debian to not promote and mention it anywhere.

That is my understanding of the conflict. While non-free firmware in the kernel is problematic RMS says he is willing to overlook for a limited time period as a practical compromise.

Fedora free?

Posted Apr 24, 2007 8:12 UTC (Tue) by robbe (guest, #16131) [Link]

> FSF wants that to be separated out entirely and wants Debian to not
> promote and mention it anywhere.

Which would be ... interesting with a lot of GNU manuals now being in
there (due to the invariant sections).

Like another poster said, there are quite a few different definitions
of "free".