This sort of thing gets me down. I get a bug report that someone can’t use their printer, and it turns out it’s because it needs the foo2zjs driver. I can’t add foo2zjs to Fedora for legal reasons (as far as I can tell), and when I explained that to them, with a link to the original decision, I get:
Great. Just great. And they say Windows is bad. Ha!
I’m not sure I can even legally give them a link to a package they can use. Not fair. 🙁
Comments
3 responses to “foo2zjs: not my fault”
I just posted the links to the bug report. 😉
‘I can’t add foo2zjs to Fedora for legal reasons (as far as I can tell)…’
I think this is the problem: the vague ‘legal reasons’ that prevent many things from being done in Fedora. Oh yeah? What legal reasons?
If we don’t like the term ‘intelectual property’ because patents, copyright and trademarks are very different areas of law, then why is it OK to site ‘legal reasons’ and send folks on a wild goose chase trying to figure out what they might be?
Of course, this is not your fault personally. I think that the Red Hat legal department is failing the community with it’s lack of transparency here.
If we can have a list of bugs, categorised by package, severity, impact etc., then why can’t we have a list of packages which have been excluded from Fedora due to legal reasons, and *what* those legal reasons are? There should be a page which neatly explains each legal reason, such as the policy on patents and how this applies accross countries, and each package should have a URL people can point to which in turn points to all the legal reasons.
‘I’m not sure I can even legally give them a link to a package…’
It’s not acceptable that you’re not sure (and you’re not the only one), and again, this is not your fault.
If Fedora is now a community distribution then this community needs it’s lawyers to give clear guidelines on what can and cannot be done. Looks like we have guidelines and a process for everything else, but legal advice is passed around by heresay from whoever happened to be standing at the Red Hat water cooler.
Please have Lewis Villa fix this while here’s there this summer 🙂
“may be afflicted by patents”: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=208397#c1
(this link was given in my original reply).