Fedora house keeping

[Posted August 23, 2006 by ris]

The Fedora Project states that it is "always free for anyone to use, modify and distribute, now and forever". This is a great goal, but sometimes it is harder to achieve in practice. Sometimes a package might slip through without a proper audit, or maybe the license has changed. For whatever reason, there are a few packages in Fedora that do not meet the definition of free software. As a result, the project is currently in the midst of a software licensing audit.

Such audits take many iterations and are not without some pain, at least for some. As a result of this work, cdrtools has been moved back to an earlier, GPL-only version, netpbm has had a number of files removed, and ckermit and macutils are gone altogether. Openmotif looks likely to come out - and to take xpdf with it.

Most people seem to embrace the concept of a totally free distribution, until some pet package is deemed "not free enough". Then the sparks fly and an adherence to open source is equated with religious zealotry.

Sometimes freedom can be inconvenient. But Red Hat's Michael Tiemann objects to allegations that Fedora is trying to become another Debian:

You forget that Fedora participants have an inside track on seeing their stuff become enterprise-ready. Some people actually care about seeing their code running in mission-critical environments. And some people actually appreciate the close interaction with Red Hat's engineers that comes as a result in working in the same tree we do. So Fedora is the best of both worlds (free software and proto-enterprise).

What we are seeing here is that Fedora is trying to take the "free software" part of the equation seriously.

Fedora house keeping

Posted Aug 24, 2006 5:02 UTC (Thu) by russell (guest, #10458) [Link] (1 responses)

Yesterday we hold back Xorg 7.1 because of proprietry drivers.
Today we champion freedom licenses and stop supporting software.
Tommorrow ???

So where does Fedora stand?

Fedora house keeping

Posted Aug 24, 2006 13:58 UTC (Thu) by mdomsch (guest, #5920) [Link]

The reasons for holding the X.org 7.1 update out of a shipping OS release were made clear.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2006-Aug...

It's not bowing to proprietary driver authors, it's recognizing that we shouldn't unnecessarily break end users.

Fedora has always aimed to provide a completely Free Software / OSI-approved license distribution. The license audit turned up a handful (out of the nearly 3000 packages in Core+Extras) that needed more consideration. It's a worthwhile exercise and in support of Fedora's legal obligations and goals.

Fedora house keeping

Posted Aug 24, 2006 19:21 UTC (Thu) by uravanbob (guest, #4050) [Link] (4 responses)

Ok, I'll bite. What is so unfree about OpenMotif aside from the fact that FSF doesn't approve of the license?

Limited to OSS systems

Posted Aug 25, 2006 11:15 UTC (Fri) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (3 responses)

What is so unfree about OpenMotif aside from the fact that FSF doesn't approve of the license?

It can be used only on open-source operating systems:

2. GRANT OF RIGHTS
The rights granted under this license are limited solely to distribution and sublicensing of the Contribution(s) on, with, or for operating systems which are themselves Open Source programs. Contact The Open Group for a license allowing distribution and sublicensing of the Original Program on, with, or for operating systems which are not Open Source programs.

(source: clause 2 in http://www.opengroup.org/openmotif/license/)

But I am too a bit puzzled why Fedora, which certainly is allowed by the license, would see this as too disagreeable.

About xpdf: If OpenMotif is weeded out, wouldn't it work with LessTif (http://www.lesstif.org/)?

Limited to OSS systems

Posted Aug 25, 2006 19:29 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses)

That particular platform restriction in openmotif makes it a non-free and non OSI compliant license which is mandated by the packaging guidelines

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Guidelines

Limited to OSS systems

Posted Aug 25, 2006 21:52 UTC (Fri) by uravanbob (guest, #4050) [Link] (1 responses)

Thanks for the clarification.

It seems a distinction without real practical benefit (what non-open source platform needs the freedom to use the free version of OpenMotif and supports X?). Although for the Fedora packagers not having to decide "Is license XYZ an open source license?" is probably of great practical benefit.

My personal concern is a legacy application (obviously since I'm using Motif :-) that used to have major issues with LessTif - it could run fine now - I haven't bothered since OpenMotif became available. These 'nits' (defined as "changes without obvious practical benefit to me" are annoying when I have a huge backlog of other tasks.

Limited to OSS systems

Posted Aug 25, 2006 22:17 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

For one as pointed out in the article, Fedora Project has explicit objectives (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Objectives) to be a Free and open source distribution. So its not merely a issue of licensing policy. The Open motif project itself seems to be not able to change its license (http://204.2.109.48/forum/viewtopic.php?p=3878#3878) at this point.

There might as well as be practical issues as pointed out in https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-maintainers/2006-A... and in http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motif.html especially that the real benefit probably is just for commercial distributions which need to support legacy applications for ISV's and customers and they wouldnt able to do so with this license anyway.

For for Fedora developers and various derivative distributions (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DerivedDistributions), the fact that the distribution would have a common set of licenses with known freedoms and restrictions and no expections would make their life easier as you have highlighted.

Fedora hasnt usually included libraries without actual applications within the formal repositories using them. The repositories only has about a dozen openmotif dependencies with xpdf being a popular one which developers are working on fixing and a number of them would work with lesstif, other frontends, some patches and so on.

If you have applications using openmotif and it wouldnt work with lesstif and there might well be a few applications in that category, your options are to provide feedback or patches to fix lesstif or the apps themselves to work better in Fedora or use openmotif from compatible third party repositories. Hope that helps.

xpdf

Posted Aug 25, 2006 11:35 UTC (Fri) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (2 responses)

Openmotif looks likely to come out - and to take xpdf with it.

The LessTif site claims xpdf works with their LGPL'd Motif clone (http://www.lesstif.org/apps.html). If that isn't the case with the latest versions, well, a good time to fix either piece of software...

xpdf

Posted Aug 25, 2006 16:28 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

xpdf works perfectly well with lesstif, as ever.

xpdf

Posted Aug 25, 2006 19:27 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

It is very likely that most of the Fedora packages dependant on Openmotif will be fixed to work on a Free software platform rather than simply thrown away.