Fedora's way forward

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le Ven 31 mars 2006 09:01, Hans de Goede a écrit :

> Speaking only for myself: I'm getting rather tired of your zealot stance
> in this discussion, especially since your contribution to Fedora seems
> to consist of only hot air aka noise in discussions like this.

Hans,

I can't speak for Sean.
But speaking as a fedora.us then Fedora Extra maintainer, and as someone
who made some years ago major contributions to a third-party repository
which mixed FOSS and non-FOSS software (some packages of which have since
found their way in FC and FE), I can assure you I am deeply attached to
the FOSS-only nature of Fedora.

You want non FOSS software fine setup your own repo. If you're good and
some stuff gets freed over time it will end up in Fedora proper. If you're
bad everyone will ignore you as they should.

And yes that's a lot more work and abuse than pushing stuff directly to FC
or FE but that's real life for you. Go complain to the closed source
writers or fork Fedora like Mandrake forked RHL if you don't like it.

To all the pragmatist zealots : you can fork Fedora at any time. If you
don't think the value of a forked Fedora is sufficient to justify the
forking efforts and legal risks that would entail for you, you have no
case.

ie it's not sufficient to say life would be better with all the closed
software stuff, you have to balance the costs (money, legal, packaging) of
getting this stuff in with the expected benefits.

Gold doesn't corrode. My life would be easier with a gold bath-tub I
wouldn't have to protect from corrosion with paint. That does not mean
paying for a gold bath-tub is a resonable proposition.

Right now I'm far too cheap to go through the hassle closed software entails.

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot