Re: Thanks, and a Brief Survey

[john palmieri <john j5 palmieri gmail com>]

On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 3:51 PM, Luis Villa <luis tieguy org> wrote:

On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 12:37 PM, Luis Villa <luis tieguy org> wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 12:31 PM, Lefty (石鏡 ) <lefty shugendo org> wrote:
>> On 1/17/10 6:52 AM, "Ciaran O'Riordan" <ciaran member fsf org> wrote:
>>>
>>> GNOME has a policy (written or not) that prohibits importing non-free
>> software
>>> into its repositories.
>>
>> I'm not personally aware of a written policy to this effect. If there's an
>> "unwritten policy", I'd encourage the Board to write it down in clear and
>> explicit terms and get it agreed to by the membership, since there's not
>> necessarily any actual common understanding of what such a policy "says" or
>> means, if that's the case.
>
> To the best of my knowledge, that policy has never been written down.

It has been pointed out that in fact it has been written down:

http://live.gnome.org/ProjectPrerequisites

and in fact I think I probably helped write it down; I'm looking
through my email to see when we had that discussion, but I'm pretty
sure that when we wrote it it was so non-controversial that it was not
discussed very much, so it won't leave much trail in my inbox.

Luis

The release team goes further for official modules and states:

Free-ness: Apps must be under a Free or Open license and support open standards and protocols. In case of doubt about the module license, send an email to the Release Team and the desktop-devel mailing list. Support of proprietary protocols and closed standards is part of the world we live in, but all applications that support closed protocols should also support open equivalents where those exist, and should default to those if at all possible while still serving their intended purpose.

http://live.gnome.org/ReleasePlanning/ModuleProposing#judgement-criteria

Of course I don't think Lefty was suggesting we host proprietary software only that "non-free" would seem to exclude "open source".  I'm not sure that is the case but for all intents and purposes, historically we have mostly accepted LGPL into the core  with perhaps some BSD and MIT licensed code residing inside those modules as is legal.  It would be a problem to accept any non GPL compatible license regardless if it is open or not.  The release team pretty much holds the keys on what is accepted and what is not.

--
John (J5) Palmieri