Fedora's way forward

[Rahul Sundaram]

On Thu, 2006-03-30 at 09:51 -0700, Stanton Finley wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-03-30 at 16:23 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> > Adding support for proprietary formats would heavily reduce the
> > incentive for people to use Free formats. Thats my take on it.
> > 
> > Rahul
> > 
> Rahul, do you use any proprietary applications on your computers at all,
> including proprietary graphics acceleration driver such as nVidia or
> ATI? 

On the machine that I run on a regular basis, I dont and certainly no
proprietary drivers but thats irrelevant since its my system. On
occasions where I had to use proprietary applications, I installed it on
my own and didnt complain that Fedora didn't provide it by default since
I know that it doesnt fit into the Fedora model. I certainly dont
provide expect that all my computing needs to be served out of the box
for me in Fedora. 

> I ask this because in this day and age much serious computer work
> is seriously hobbled without at least some of them, depending on what
> you do with your computer of course. Reading and replying to emails is
> one thing. 3D rendering work is quite another. See what I'm getting at?

If your 3D rendering work requires proprietary drivers get it post
installation. We are making it more and more easier to install
applications from a repository in pretty much every release. Earlier you
had to fiddle with yum repository configuration files. Now you just
install a repository release package. In next release you might be able
to point to a repository and get packages during installation itself.
Maybe add the functionality that lets you lets you click and install
packages from repositories using Pirut and a firefox plugin. 


Alternatively there are efforts to produce good 3D drivers and open
hardware. Invest your development skills, other efforts or money in such
things.  Buy hardware that plays open formats and tell those other
companies that you went with the competition because they didnt support
open formats. Build demand and volume for that. Yes, thats harder than
installing proprietary drivers but nobody said that developing a
completely Free and open source system was going to be easy and thats
exactly what Fedora's goals are right from the start and it has very
explicit. We have enough problems to tackle in other places in Fedora
without spending time discussing for the umpteenth time why Fedora
doesnt support the patent and proprietary mp3 codec. Please be more
constructive. 


Rahul