Fedora's way forward

[Eric S. Raymond]

Rahul Sundaram <sundaram at fedoraproject.org>:
> You mean to say that Fedora should give up its support towards Free and
> open source software and adopt proprietary formats and software in the
> name of pragmatism.

Rahul, you're being tendentious.  Nobody -- least of all me -- is
arguing that Fedora should "give up its support towards Free and open
source software".

I'm just arguing that we should treat ordinary users as though they matter.
That's how we'll get the market share and the clout to do what we 
really want.  Be honest, now -- do you realy suppose ODF would have even a
*prayer* of widespread adoption if Oo didn't also read Microsoft Word files?

Take audio as an example.  Yes, Ogg Vorbis is a better format.  I rip
all my CDs to Ogg Vorbis, and I'm totally behind the idea that we
should encourage everyone to do likewise.  That's our ODF.  But the
reality is that J. Random User wants to listen to podcasts, and the
podcasts are in MP3.  That's our Microsoft Word.

If we say to J. Random "No, we won't support MP3, shut up it's bad
for you", it's just as if we tried to sell him on an ODF-only word
processor by saying "no, you really don't want to touch all those
cruddy old Word documents".

That's not how you win hearts and minds.  It's how you get dismissed as
as a gang of useless wankers.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>