Fedora Workstation proposal: ease installation of non-free software

This proposal comes out of the work on the Fedora Workstation PRD.

The Fedora project values freedom and has for a long time tried to minimize
our users exposure to non-free software.  While this is a good idea the
time has come for fine tuning the policy a bit. Fedora has been declining
in popularity for a long time now and we are trying to revamp it with the
ongoing Fedora.next work. That work has a lot of components, but one of
them is to make getting the software you need installed and running easily
on Fedora in a userfriendly manner.

As part of this a new software installer has been developed, as first seen
in Fedora 20 (https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Software).
This new installer has given the Fedora desktop the beginning of a more
user friendly way and thus competitive way of installing new applications
and similar, but to finish the task we need to be able to offer users easy
access to the most popular and sometimes critical pieces of Linux software
available, including non-free software.

The way we want to achieve this is to make such software discoverable and
installable through the new software installer. We want to do that in a way
we feel is compatible with the overall goals of Fedora and legally sound.

In order to keep with the Fedora policy of only shipping free software we
will only make available 3rd party software that offers their own
repository for their software. Examples here include Google Chrome and
Adobe Acrobat.

In order to keep things clear in a legal sense we will only include such
software in collaboration with said upstream and after a review by lawyers.

The software will come with a warning in the installer that this is not
software provided by the Fedora project and that users need to contact the
relevant upstream for support. We will also make it clear that this is not
free software and users will be presented with a need to 'opt-in' to use
said non-free software for that reason.

We have created a mockup of how this could look, but be aware that this was
put together quickly and is in no way the final design. Neither all the
textual information we want in there as outlined above is included nor is
the final version likely to look exactly like this. We still feel it might
help people understand a bit more where we are going with this: 
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5031519/software/wire...

The working groups will be free to decide what software to try to get
included based on the guidelines above. In terms of technical impact and
support overhead the working group will need to decide if something is
'supportable' and work with relevant development teams as needed.

In Fedora we want to support and encourage Freedom. We can only achieve
that goal if we are considered relevant and with a sizeable community using
Fedora.  We support and encourage the use of free options in Fedora by
having them as our default and recommended solutions, but we are only
hurting ourselves and limiting our chance to educate and inform our users
by making them turn away from Fedora due to feeling that getting what might
be critical software for their usage is a hassle with Fedora.

So to summarize the proposal.

* Fedora will continue to not ship non-free software and as part of that
  will continue to only default to free software.
* We will add the needed metadata to the Software installer to give our
  users the freedom to choose to install legally cleared 3rd party software
* The Working groups will have the ability to work with legal council and
  technical teams to achieve this goal


Sincerely,
Christian F.K. Schaller
Fedora Workstation Working Group
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