From the Multiverse? dept.:
The Red Hat-sponsored Fedora project is undergoing several changes before the release of its next version. In preparation for Fedora 7, which will fuse the Core and Extra software repositories, Fedora's developers are auditing the repositories for non-free and non-open software that doesn't meet the project's guidelines. Eventually, the project may change its package guidelines to only allow Free Software.

Following a message from Michael Tiemann, Red Hat's vice president of open source affairs, to the Fedora Advisory Board mailing list in April 2006, board member Rahul Sundaram and Fedora developer Tom Callaway initiated a licensing audit of Fedora. After a strenuous scanning process, several changes were made to the Core repository to make Fedora compliant with its own packaging guidelines. "What we did before Fedora Core 6," says Sundaram, "is go through the entire Fedora Core packages to make sure we are compliant with our own guidelines, since many of these packages were inherited from Red Hat Linux during the project launch a few years back."

The next task in their queue is cross-checking the Fedora's Extras repository, which will be merged with the Core repository before the upcoming release. The Fedora Extras packages already go through a peer review process which includes a license check before a package is allowed into the repository.

linux.com