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View Full Version : Fedora has been set free


poofyhairguy
June 4th, 2005, 10:39 AM
The Gnome world just got better. Fedora has been turned over to its community.

http://business.newsforge.com/business/05/06/03/1729211.shtml?tid=18

Hopefully this will end the many incompatible RPM repos and lead to better days when all of Fedora's packages are in a few places.
Knome_fan
June 4th, 2005, 10:47 AM
Hm, I think the Linux world as a whole just got better.

Anyway, great news. :grin:
Lovechild
June 4th, 2005, 01:16 PM
I don't really see how that changes much, Fedora was extremely free before and RH provided good guidance. I personally fear that RH will no divert more engineering time directly into RHEL instead of Fedora, lenghten the Fedora cycle (so it mismatches GNOME release cycles meaning Fedora will at some point ship with GNOME releases that are hopelessly outdated)

Now will this mean Fedora is suddenly free to add stuff like Mono, I doubt it, doing so will still be in violation of the GPL (patents require a royalty free redistribution clause).

But I'm happy to see more community involvement welcomed by RedHat, however I like Fedora as it has been so far, it's a high quality product and RH work well with the community.
Knome_fan
June 4th, 2005, 05:21 PM
Now will this mean Fedora is suddenly free to add stuff like Mono, I doubt it, doing so will still be in violation of the GPL (patents require a royalty free redistribution clause).


Where did you get the idea that packaging Mono would be a violation of the GPL??? Did you tell all the other distros, like Debian and Ubuntu, that are packaging it because it is free software?

And since when exactly did GPL compatability become a requirement for inclusion into Fedora? They are shipping apache, aren't they?
Lovechild
June 4th, 2005, 05:48 PM
Where did you get the idea that packaging Mono would be a violation of the GPL??? Did you tell all the other distros, like Debian and Ubuntu, that are packaging it because it is free software?

And since when exactly did GPL compatability become a requirement for inclusion into Fedora? They are shipping apache, aren't they?

Because the .NET ECMA license doesn't grant the patent grants required by the GPL, therefore linking with a GPL'ed piece of code is in violation of said license. For extensive details of this argument read the Fedora Extras mailinglist where it has been explained over and over again.
Gtaylor
June 5th, 2005, 05:36 AM
I have now given up trying to understand the company that is Redhat. Who knows what their next move will be, there's just no guessing it now :)