Wild and crazy times for the development tree

[Mike A. Harris]

Callum Lerwick wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-03-20 at 21:15 +0000, Paul F. Johnson wrote:
> 
>>A *much* reduced core size (5 CDs + rescue is getting a bit much)
> 
> 
> IMHO its getting time to just forget CDs. Put out DVD isos only. (At the
> very least, stop worrying about how many CDs core fills and worry about
> fitting on one DVDR...)
> 
> Especially with yum backed network installs becoming available. If you
> don't want to download and burn an entire DVD iso, just download a
> 10-50mb network install iso. This is what I do with debian on the rare
> occasion I install a system from scratch. Since I only install a system
> once every few years, its a huge waste to me to download and burn 5+
> disks that I'm only going to use once.
> 
> Someone on IRC was arguing that in many parts of the world, bandwidth is
> very expensive. I don't see how 5 CDs to download vs a DVD make a
> difference here. The real question is, how common are DVD burners, and
> most importantly, DVD readers in various parts of the world.

I had an IRC discussion with a nice fellow from Jakarta a number of
months back, who explained how expensive it was to be on the internet.
He had a 56k connection, which cost him the equivalent of $20 USD for
the month.

My first thought was probably quite similar to what many of you are
currently thinking:  "Um, well that's very close to what it costs in
the US for access too, so is not really more expensive."

Except for the fact that this person was a full time computer
programmer, and told me that his monthly salary was the equivalent
of $200 US dollars.  Think about that.  His monthly internet connection
cost him 1/10th of his entire income for the month, just to get a
crappy 56k connection which ties up the phoneline as long as it is
connected.  I don't know if there were per-minute telephone fees
on top of that or not.

For each employed person reading this, take 1/10th of your income.
Would you pay that much money to have a 56k phone line based internet
connection each month?  Even if you did do so, would you want to
download the entire DVD ISO image which takes anywhere from 2-3 weeks
to download?  All this through a phone line which gets very frequently
disconnected?

I told him perhaps he should just purchase Fedora Core on CD instead,
and indicated there were many places online which you could order CDs.
He said it would be about $10, which again is like 5% of his monthly
income.  And that's a twice a year cost.  He said that buying Fedora
CDs locally was more expensive for "free software" than buying bootleg
copies of Windows XP down the street for $2-5 a pop.

That's only one single city in one country in the world.  There are
a great many of places in the world in which costs similar or higher
to this exist, and downloading large images is very prohibitive.

Another consideration worth mentioning is the OLPC project.


> I suppose the thing to do is keep an eye on CD downloads vs DVD. Let the
> community decide.

Living in North America, and having the pleasure of owning a DVD burner,
and having a huge stack of blank media, and a high speed Internet
connection (cablemodem) which costs me a very small fraction of my
income each month - I, like many North Americans do prefer to download
the DVD ISO images, and have no personal interest in the CD ISO images.
If the CD ISOs were to be dropped completely, it would bear practically
no consequence to me, as I have no use for them at all personally.

However, not having CD ISOs available would create a huge barrier for
many people in the world who are much less fortunate than you or I, who
either do not have high speed Internet, or who simply can't afford it,
or like the fellow I spoke to from Jakarta - who spend a massive
portion of their monthly income just to have the priveledge of using
open source software, because they believe it is the right thing to do.

Open source software (free software if you prefer) should be accessible
to all people, regardless of what country they live in, or their
personal financial circumstances.  Wherever possible it should not only
be free as in liberty, but also be available free of cost, or as close
to free of cost as possible.

So, as long as Fedora can be provided via CD ISO images for a reasonable
manpower cost in doing the work necessary to allow it to continue to
be viable, then it _should_ continue to be available in this manner
IMHO.  I think there are some creative ideas to allow this to be viable
for quite some time, and it seems that the Fedora Project is heading
in the right direction WRT this.

There is no really easy way to gauge how many people download the
CD images versus the DVD images, and equally no easy way to gauge
how many people install the OS from either based off how many
downloads there were.  Add bittorrent to the mix, and various other
download methods, other peer-to-peer networks, etc. and it's just
not possible to gauge.  It is quite clear to me however, that there
is a very significant number of people using CD based installs still,
and as long as that is evident enough in the community, I would be
quite surprised to see us seriously entertain the idea of dropping
CD based installation.  In fact, I would very strongly and vocally
oppose such an idea.



-- 
Mike A. Harris  *  Open Source Advocate  *  http://mharris.ca
                       Proud Canadian.