On 04/21/2014 01:27 PM, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
>
> On 04/21/2014 01:07 PM, Haïkel Guémar wrote:
>
> We should think on how we could improve collaboration with
> third-party repos, fedmsg/copr might be part of the technical
> solution. How about a Fedora Partnership Program ? We could open up
> at a certain extent our infrastructure and collaborate with software
>  editors to make sure that their products have some support in
> Fedora.
>
>
> I love this idea and I think we should probably start another thread
> on it when this one starts to die down, assuming that the general
> sense is that the community wants to improve our
> third-party/non-FOSS relationships.


The choices we make are determined by the possibilities we are presented with. While we all agree that it's neither possible nor desirable to prevent installation of whatever tools the end user wants, the Freedom absolutists would like to put up a barrier against non-Free software, or at least want Fedora to abstain from helping. I personally prefer that choice to be given to the users, who should be able to indicate what they want on their systems.

Now, these abstract choices take shape during software installation, so it seems to me that they should be entered as user preferences in the software installer to shape the results of software search. In other words, ask the user what they want to see, and then let them choose from the results.

We've discussed several such values-based choices:

- the license conditions (Free vs. encumbered vs. non-Free and commercial)

- tolerance for gritty old commandline tools vs. polished apps only

- choice between full functionality vs. small size and/or speed

I think they all can be seen as user preferences in the software installer discovery process, making the installer central to how the resulting system is put together. This is consistent with how Droid and iOS make software 'stores' and installation a central point of interaction for configuring their systems.