(nonfree) blobwars family of games

Rahul Sundaram sundaram at fedoraproject.org
Sat Sep 27 03:17:34 PDT 2008


Ben Finney wrote:
> Rahul Sundaram <sundaram at fedoraproject.org> writes:
> 
>> Ben Finney wrote:
>>> Hans de Goede <j.w.r.degoede at hhs.nl> writes:
>>>> (in Fedora we do not demand that content licenses allow
>>>> modification, an architect may not want to have the house he
>>>> designed changed afterwards, a painter does not want his painting
>>>> modified, etc.).
>>> Those arguments are as valid for programs as for any other
>>> software; i.e. not at all. A programmer, after all, "may not want
>>> to have the program he wrote changed by the recipient afterwards".
>>> That doesn't give any support to the idea that such a work belongs
>>> in a free operating system.
>> FSF makes the distinction between software and "non functional
>> data".
> 
> No matter who makes an argument, it should be criticised on its
> merits. I merely pointed out the inherent fallacy in supposing that
> one bitstream can be distinguished from another in terms of what
> freedom the recipient deserves.
> 
> I'm not interested in opening a flame war, but I'm also not going to
> let flawed arguments against software freedom go unchallenged.

Freedom in software tends to more nuanced. Anyway, here are the 
guidelines that Fedora follows. I know Mandriva largely agrees with it. 
Other distributions have to check against their own policies to see what 
matches.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Guidelines#Legal

Rahul




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