The Fedora Project Remains Community Driven
&gt; For example, Gentoo Linux, another community driven distribution, cannot and will not redistribute proprietary software at all. And this is not something that can be voted on, but must be complied with. This doesn’t mean that Gentoo Linux is not community driven whatsoever; it only means that it’s legally bound<p>This is quite a poorly chosen example since Gentoo will not ship binaries period. To this day I don&#x27;t think there is an official host for binary packages (binhost).<p>Gentoo happily ships automated build instructions for all types of patent-encumbered (see USE flag &quot;bindist&quot;) and even proprietary software (in which case it&#x27;s more like &quot;download instructions&quot; rather than build). bindist USE flag is enabled by default since without it even OpenSSL is crippled.<p>i.e. your Gentoo box is likely to play H264&#x2F;H265 out-of-the-box, at least once you get to rebuild the codecs as part of the normal setup.<p>I think this is an important point because the entire argument smells wrongly. There is an evident scale of distros that are more &quot;deadly afraid&quot; of software patents vs distros that simply don&#x27;t care, and it is common knowledge that Fedora is practically leading the &quot;afraid&quot; side. Gentoo is nowhere near close. Even Debian&#x2F;Ubuntu is a bit more towards the don&#x27;t care side (albeit not by much). Their stance with e.g. the openSSL EC patents comes to mind: Fedora decided to cripple OpenSSL here (hobble_openssl patchset) but Debian did not.<p>So it&#x27;s obviously untrue that the response of the distro comes dictated by some magical all-knowing law entity. Interpretation of the law is an open topic (until tested in court) and thus can be subject to community vote.