RPM Fusion Legal Question

Project Discussion
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1

Hello Fedora community,

as far as I know, RPM Fusion can’t be part of the Fedora Project or hosted by it, because the contained software, like the VLC player, even though it is open source software, has a potentially problematic legal status in some countries, especially the USA, and so Red Hat wants to keep it away.
I can understand that.
But I just did a whois on the IP Address of flathub.org and it is hosted on an IP range that is owned by Red Hat:

[hege@tx1 ~]$ host flathub.org
flathub.org has address 8.43.85.3
...
[hege@tx1 ~]$ whois 8.43.85.3
...
NetRange:       8.43.84.0 - 8.43.87.255
CIDR:           8.43.84.0/22
NetName:        LVLT-REDHAT-1-8-43-84
NetHandle:      NET-8-43-84-0-1
Parent:         LVLT-ORG-8-8 (NET-8-0-0-0-1)
NetType:        Reassigned
OriginAS:       
Organization:   Red Hat, Inc. (REDHAT-1)
RegDate:        2016-12-15
Updated:        2016-12-15
Ref:            https://rdap.arin.net/registry/ip/8.43.84.0
...

So, now the RPM Fusion situation doesn’t make any sense to me anymore. Flathub has much more potentially problematic software than RPM Fusion does, but Red Hat even hosts it themselves. Also, in Fedora 38 we will have the option for unfiltered Flathub access (which is great and I love it), but on the other hand, RPM Fusion is still treated like “that shadowy place over there”.
So, with all of that, wouldn’t it make sense to at least also grant unfiltered RPM Fusion access, just the way unfiltered Flathub access is going to be granted in Fedora 38? There doesn’t seem to be much legal concern anymore by Red Hat or Fedora.

2

I am not a legal expert and I am not speaking on behalf of Red Hat. My guess is it comes down to financial and legal accountability for the hosted software. The official Fedora RPM repositories are hosted on Red Hat infrastructure and Red Hat is legally accountable for the provided software within those repositories. However, Flatpak is set up as its own financially-independent organization. I may remember correctly or incorrectly that the GNOME Foundation is the legal entity behind Flatpak. All of these things could be factors that impact the legal ability for RPM Fusion content to be distributed in more mainstream channels.

Some time ago, Third-Party Repositories were added to Fedora for specific packages, which included some from RPM Fusion like the NVIDIA drivers and Steam. I don’t know what the eligibility criteria used was for selecting those two packages, but there is a precedent for specific and narrowly-scoped packages to be included in Fedora as opt-in Third-Party Repositories.

1 Like
3

I believe both can be legally redistributed