[Ambassadors] The lack of quality video drivers is destroying Fedora.

[David Nalley]

Honestly it doesn't matter whether you agree or not.
Fedora is tied to Red Hat, Red Hat isn't going to expose itself to
liability by including non-free codecs. Let's not forget that Red Hat
own 80% of the commercial Linux market, and contributes a ton to
important projects like the Linux kernel, X.org and Gnome, and as such
is a HUGE target. And that makes the penalty for securing 3d
acceleration on a video card look way unbalanced.

More importantly one of Fedora's founding principles is freedom. Part
of that is open source - if you don't like Fedora's stance on open
source software there are other distributions who don't take as hard a
stance. Part of that is freedom to redistribute - yes Fedora could get
a license to redistribute (if Fedora didn't care about open source
software) and they could redistribute some binary drivers from ATI or
Nvidia - but then downstream distributions couldn't do that legally -
again there are other distributions that don't take as firm a stance -
but Fedora does.

Fedora doesn't take its stance on freedom out of some masochistic
tendencies. Actually Fedora understands and believes that Free/Libre
Open Source Software is the way to go. Fedora understands that you
don't become more free by pushing non-free software into the
distribution. Fedora has tremendous leverage power relatively speaking
because they won't package non-free software. So when the likes of
Yahoo want something like Zimbra in Fedora - they bring their
licensing into compliance. When Mozilla wants to push a EULA on end
users, Fedora has a lot more standing to object.

While I rarely suggest that people would be happier with other
distributions I think it may be true in this instance.

Paul is essentially correct-

You either have to convince the video card manufacturers to open
source their drivers or at least release the specs, OR you have to
write them. Nouveau is doing this, if it's so important an issue I
hope that you are supporting them and actively involved in their
project.

On the MP3 and other codec front - you'd essentially need to convince
legislators that the patent laws need to be rewritten.

Please stop asking for Fedora to change - you'd essentially have to
rid Fedora of Red Hat - populate the board with people who don't care
about Fedora's stance on freedom, and hope that you don't get Fedora
sued in the process. As an ambassador I'd expect that all of you
understand why Fedora has taken it's stance on freedom and why it's
important not to compromise, and not call to uproot the very
foundation that fedora is built on.





> As far as I know, Livna policy is to only include open source software. It
> is a repo for patent-problematic, but yet open source software. So MPEG-4,
> MP3, AAC, H.264, Xvid, MPlayer etc stuff -- that all has open source
> implementations -- are available on Livna, and this is enough for playing
> virtually all multimedia content you can get.
>
> Also, the nVidia and ATI drivers at Livna are the open source ones -- not
> the original, more feature rich, more powerful, 3D capable, binary ones.
> I believe there is also a license problem when you download the original
> binary drivers, repackage them and put them someplace else for downloading.
> They are not freely distributable, I think. So if you repackage these binary
> drivers you are violating their licence for distribution.
>
> What I think Livna (or other repo) could do is what the JPackage project
> does for a long time: provide nosrc.rpm packages.
> These are only the source RPM without the license-problematic stuff. From
> the user perspective, he'll have to download the nosrc.rpm file plus the ZIP
> file from ATI/nVidia web site and issue one simple rpmbuild command to get
> the installable RPM.
>
> Altought I understand the political and religious guidelines of the Fedora
> project, I still believe this is a huge problem that should be discussed and
> fixed somehow. So in this point, I don't agree with Paul Stauffer in his
> previous e-mail.
>
> Regards,
> Avi
>
> 2008/9/29 Shambo Bose <shambo.linux at gmail.com>
>>
>>
>> 2008/9/29 Juan M. Rodriguez <nushio at gmail.com>
>>>
>>>
>>> 2008/9/29 Shambo Bose <shambo.linux at gmail.com>
>>>>
>>>> hello
>>>>
>>>> We can always create a secondary non free repository which will contain
>>>> all the free drivers and packages[ which is not open source]
>>>> and the mp3 part is ok... they are playing mp3 in that way.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Thanks.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Shambo Bose
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Fedora-ambassadors-list mailing list
>>>> Fedora-ambassadors-list at redhat.com
>>>> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-ambassadors-list
>>>>
>>>
>>> "We can always create a secondary non free repository"
>>>
>>> We already have one, its called Livna[1], they provide packages for both
>>> ATI and Nvidia cards that are packaged for Fedora, which would mean no
>>> conflicts with existing drivers. They are sometimes hours-to-days behind
>>> kernel updates (Specifically security kernel updates) which leaves users
>>> with dependency conflicts (Either update the kernel and lose the drivers, or
>>> stay insecure for some time)
>>>
>>> [1] http://rpm.livna.org
>>>
>>> Regards
>>> --
>>> Ing. Juan M. Rodriguez Moreno
>>> Desarrollador de Sistemas Abiertos
>>> Sitio: http://proyectofedora.org/mexico
>>>
>>> --
>>> Fedora-ambassadors-list mailing list
>>> Fedora-ambassadors-list at redhat.com
>>> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-ambassadors-list
>>>
>> Hello
>>
>> The livna graphics drivers does not support 3D hardware Acceleration . Is
>> livna a official fedora repository?
>>
>> regards,
>> Shambo Bose
>>
>> --
>> Fedora-ambassadors-list mailing list
>> Fedora-ambassadors-list at redhat.com
>> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-ambassadors-list
>>
>
>
>
> --
> http://avi.alkalay.net/blog
>
> --
> Fedora-ambassadors-list mailing list
> Fedora-ambassadors-list at redhat.com
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>
>