grip being removed [Re: rawhide report: 20050120 changes]

[Paul A. Houle]

On Mon, 14 Feb 2005 11:58:26 +0100, Iago Rubio <iago.rubio at hispalinux.es>  
wrote:

> Feel free to buy an MP3 decoder license and donate it to rh.
> http://www.mp3licensing.com/help/developer.html#1
> http://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/amm/legal/index.html
> http://www.mp3licensing.com/royalty/index.html
>

	That's insane.

	The decoder license is $60,000.  What's that?  The revenue RH gets from  
selling 40 copies of RHEL 3 AS -- with a kernel that's so full of race  
conditions and deadlocks that we had to wipe our hands of it and just  
install mainline 2.6 (the system runs quite nicely now) and support that  
ought to be in the dictionary next to "worthless".  It's good if you have  
problems like

Q: The computer doesn't turn on
A: Have you looked to see if it's plugged in?

or

Q: I forgot the root password.
A: Try booting with a rescue disk

	But if you're unlucky enough to have kernel problems with RH (and I've  
had them on every RH distribution from kernel 2.2 to kernel 2.4) you're  
SOL.  I've had great experiences with Fedora and am optimistic about RHEL  
4,  but I've been burned bad enough I just might install Solaris 10 on the  
next batch of servers I'm getting.

	Perhaps RH could spend some of the money that it's not spending on  
quality assurance and support and buy a decoder license and put an end to  
this nonsense.  (Granted,  I don't see a 'one-time' licensing fee for the  
encoder and the encoder licensing really does look stiff.)