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posted by on Wednesday April 19 2017, @07:39AM   Printer-friendly
from the Free-as-in-TANSTAAFL dept.

Fedora is drafting a new mission statement. The new initial proposal:

Fedora creates an innovative platform that lights up hardware, clouds, and containers for software developers and community members to build tailored solutions for their users.

The original goal was:

to work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from open source software.

Is saying open, or free, openly (excuse the pun) becoming something to be ashamed of? Are project ditching their ideals? Fedora barely mentioned free (or Free, to be more clear), but now it's even more vague. It's like if had to be reminded over and over to those in charge, as the triggered thread demostrates.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Wednesday April 19 2017, @05:22PM (1 child)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday April 19 2017, @05:22PM (#496429) Journal

    Sorry, you should have said "Red Hat never sold Fedora Linux". There have been many versions that they did sell. I used to regularly buy "Red Hat, Professional Edition" until they suddenly and without warning discontinued it. They only wanted to sell to companies, or at least to people who were willing to pay thousands of dollars. I haven't followed them closely since then. I took Fedora to be the reincarnation of "Raw Meat" or whatever they called their development version, and the early ones were, though I understand it's gotten more stable.

    Debian has been a pretty good replacement, though there was a time when I'd install a new distribution every month just to try them out.

    One thing this revision convinces me of is that the GPL is the best license. You can't trust ANY organization not to become corrupt. Currently, and for my own work, I favor the AGPL or the GPL3. But I'm still not convinced to accept the "or any later version" phrase, because you can't trust ANY organization not to become corrupt.

    --
    Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 19 2017, @10:12PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 19 2017, @10:12PM (#496589)

    Have all code licensed under GPLv3/AGPLv3/LGPLv3 with the 'or later' clause provisional on the project head published an enactment of it when the new license comes out, or transferring the right to do so to the suceeding project lead.

    This allows you to keep it from being 'or later' if the later licenses suck, but leave the opportunity open unlike in the GPLv2 (no or later) case of Linux. Trying to allow/disallow a change in license is easier if you have the permission implicit up-front rather than having to rewrite or petition every dev at some indeterminate point in the future.