On Thu, 2016-05-12 at 14:16 +0100, Richard Hughes wrote:
Hi,
I'm the upstream GNOME Software maintainer, but I'm emailing now as a
Fedora package maintainer. Upstream gnome-software is soon to add
support for paid software, driven by Canonical for the snappy work
they are doing. One upside for us is that it now makes it possible to
provide a way for end users to donate to specific projects, and after
talking to Peter Robinson he suggested I should email here for
advice.
The options we have are basically:
* Disable all support for paid applications and donations from the
UI
completely
* Enable the "Donate" button that takes you to the upstream-defined
donation link (e.g. GIMP ->
https://www.gimp.org/donating/)
* Hijack the donate button to take people to
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Contribute or something more beautiful
We could also enable/disable the button depending on the non-freeness
or 3rd-party-ness of the application, but then my worry would be that
would actually _dissuade_ otherwise free software projects from being
shipped by Fedora as the revenue stream would be stopped when they
move from a COPR to core.
I'm not sure what the Fedora requirements are here, and I wanted some
advice from the Council about what is acceptable. Thanks!
I'm not on the council, but I'll add my own opinion anyway:
I don't think the last option is a great idea; it may lead to confusion
for users ('I wanted to donate to the Gimp and you tried to made me
give money to Fedora instead') and resentment among upstreams ('You're
using my work to collect money for your project').