Fedora Desktop future- RedHat moves

[Les Mikesell]

Antonio Olivares wrote:
> > 
>> So you like it because it's not quite impossible to
>> do what you want?
>>
> Yes, it is not impossible.  Just leave the default
> Fedora stuff alone, put the stuff you need elsewhere
> and you are good to go.  Fedora does not prohibit us
> from compiling from source and installing our own
> programs.

But it's not really the best platform for this since it changes so 
quickly and makes you repeat much of your own work frequently.

>  Now if you want to use third party rpms for
> the programs that you need, that is another matter,
> that is between you, the third party packagers and the
> fedora team.  This I cannot say much because I try not
> to depend too much on third party packagers.  

And likewise, their choice to change interfaces rapidly makes it 
difficult to take advantage of other people's work.

> I commend the third party packagers because they work
> hard to make the *non-free stuff* work on Fedora.  The
> programs work nicely, but then updates come about and
> the program might not work as it did and bugs appear
> and it takes time for the mirrors to sync and us users
> complain that a certain program is not working.   We
> want everything right here right now, and we simply
> cannot have that.  It is not a matter of Fedora being
> the bad guy, Life is like that in general.  

Interfaces and standards are what makes cooperation possible. Whether 
you think they are bad guys or not will depend on how seriously you take 
the proposition that interfaces are contracts among programmers.  I take 
it very seriously because every change hurts everyone else, and 
everything that is not backwards-compatible or standards-compliant will 
cost other people time and trouble.  I think that is a bad thing.  Other 
people have a different opinion and think everything an upstream 
developer writes should be published even if it is buggy, badly 
designed, not compatible with what they did last week and breaks all of 
the work others had been trying to do to build on it.  I can respect the 
long view of that opinion in that new ideas and code have to be tested 
somewhere, but I do what I have to to avoid being hurt by it personally.

>>> If some software is illegal, what will the big
>> guys do
>>> to a little guy?  Will they sue me because I have
>>> nonfree stuff?
>> If they had any sense, they would arrange simple
>> ways for you to get 
>> legal, licensed copies.  
> 
> They tried to do that with Fluendo/Codec Buddy, but in
> many ways it sucks!  The third party packagers *put
> their name here* make programs work in combination
> with the fedora programs and everything works as it is
> supposed to.  

Agreed - the sensible approach would be to design a strictly-standard 
interface around all patented code so you could get a licensed copy for 
yourself or a specific device once, ever, and continue to use it 
regardless of OS or application changes.  But with any GPL'd code 
involved there is no way to design such a thing and no business model to 
support it.  Proprietary OS's and applications can simply roll the cost 
of the license into the cost of the overall product.

>> And the OS would go out of
>> its way to make sure 
>> that the one such copy you obtain continues to run
>> for at least the life 
>> of your machine.  With Java, getting the copy is
>> matter of accepting the 
>> form as you download from the Sun site - getting
>> fedora to recognize 
>> that you have a JVM installed for the packages that
>> need one is a whole 
>> different matter.
> 
> The legal staff is the one that recommends that Fedora
> do this to avoid potential lawsuits and to restrict
> certain stuff from happening.

The jpackage nosrc rpm approach had no legal issues.

> Java is coming along
> very well, in Fedora 8 there was iced tea,

Standards compliance is a yes or no question.  Almost doesn't count.

> in the
> upcoming Fedora 9, there will be an adaptation to the
> OpenJDK/ whatever it is called and it is working for
> me very well.  Of course some of the stuff that Sun
> puts in there does not get there because of little
> technicalities, but otherwise the product works and
> many users appreciate that.  

Do you expect this to be backwards compatible with what they have 
published previously?  That is, will the almost-java code that has been 
written to work around the non-compliant version that fedora has shipped 
for years run transparently on a compliant JVM?  If it doesn't, how is 
the fedora near-java different from the one Microsoft tried to ship from 
the perspective of an end user who doesn't want to be locked into a 
platform?

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com