RPM Fusion founding principles

This page contains the set of founding principles, much like the "Core Principles" of Fedora.

Principles we agree on

• The RPM Fusion's repositories and the infrastructure to maintain them will follow Fedora where possible. This means using Fedora's packaging guidelines (except for legal), Fedora's review process for new submissions, Fedora's VCS structure etc.
• We'll have two main repos in the beginning:
  • one named "free" for Open Source Software (as defined by the Fedora Packaging Guidelines) which can't be included in Fedora because it might be patent encumbered in the US
  • one named "nonfree" for non-free software, e.g. everything else which can't be in freeworld; this includes software with public available source-code that has "no commercial use"-like restrictions
  The nonfree repository will depend on the free repository; Open Source Software which depends on non-free software needs to be shipped in the nonfree repository. Both repositories will contain only add-on packages and not replacements in relation to the base package set. Whereby the base package set is defined as: RHEL/CentOS + EPEL or Fedora (Fedora 7+)
• RPM Fusion will contain kernel module packages in the main repo, even if Fedora will drop them (which looks likely as of August 2007)

Principles under discussion

• kernel packages -- needs to be discussed again (other stuff is higher on the todo list right now) how to actually package them; it might be possible to package them with both the kmod (fedora) or dkms (freshrpms) kernel module packaging schemes in one repository.
• after the freeworld and nonfree repositories are running we might start an additional repository where with proper motivation replacements are allowed. This repo which will NOT be enabled by default.

Footnotes

Notice that this doesn't mention how we are actually going todo anything yet, nor with which base distro releases we will start. This is intentional as these (important) details are not part of our founding principles.