Re: kernel-libre (hopefully 100% Free) for Fedora 8 and rawhide

[Alexandre Oliva <aoliva redhat com>]

On Mar 23, 2008, Chris Snook <csnook redhat com> wrote:

> You've designed this in a manner that makes it useful only for
> preaching to the choir.  If that's your goal, so be it.  I think
> that your idea is very useful, and if implemented slightly
> differently, it could reach a lot more people and have a much
> greater impact.

There's a mistake here: I haven't designed this, I've so far merely
copied the existing practice from several other distros that care
about freedom.

I'm not opposed to improving things in kernel land.  But I don't have
illusions that this will be an easy path.  Meanwhile, having a kernel
that works for me (and, for me, that means 100% Free) is nice, and the
easiest way to accomplish that is to just remove stuff.  Once that's
under control, we can focus on doing things right.  That's how FLOSS
developers works, right?  Post something that works at first, and then
people will help and make contributions and improve the code.

Waiting until the upstream kernel is perfect won't cut it.

> I think you'll accomplish more by pushing Fedora to be more Free than
> by starting your own fork.

Exactly.  That's why I'd rather see this 100% Free kernel in Fedora,
at least as an alternative, even if a temporary one.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
FSF Latin America Board Member         http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva {redhat com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist  oliva {lsd ic unicamp br, gnu.org}