On Mon, 2014-04-21 at 08:36 -0400, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
The language in this Foundation is sometimes dangerously unclear.
For
example, it pretty much explicitly forbids the use of non-free
components in the creation of Fedora (sorry, folks: you can't use
Photoshop to create your package icon!). At the same time, we
regularly allow the packaging of software that can interoperate with
non-free software; we allow Pidgin and other IM clients to talk to
Google and AOL, we allow email clients to connect to Microsoft
Exchange, etc. The real problem is that every time a question comes up
against the Freedom Foundation, Fedora contributors diverge into two
armed camps: the hard-liners who believe that Fedora should never
under any circumstances work (interoperate) with proprietary services
and the the folks who believe that such a hard-line approach is a path
to irrelevance.
There is also a third group, somewhere in between, who believe that's ok
to ship Free Software that connects and interops with proprietary
services (gtalk, aws, etc), but it's not ok to ship proprietary
software, metadata about proprietary software or advertise proprietary
services through our main UI tools.
You should also keep in mind that "Functional" is very subjective and I
don't see how it can walk through such debates. People will still align
the "Functional" foundation to align with their point of view ;)