pdf toolchain notes & suggestions

[Karsten Wade]

On Thu, 2004-09-30 at 13:13, Paul W. Frields wrote:

> Do you see what I'm getting at? I think this was the point Karsten was
> making. He killed the horse with a single, subtle shot, whereas I am now
> beating its dead, flyblown corpse. :-P  (yuck, sorry)

I think both you and Dalibor were eloquent and accurate, and I think the
three of us are all essentially saying the same thing.  

"Free is free is free."  When you introduce non-free, you get a chain
like this: "Free is free is not-free."  Ooops, broken.

Here is the bottom line -- we will *not* be able to put a non-free
toolchain in Fedora.  We might as well rename our project and do
something else, if that is what we are going to do.  The Fedora
community won't stand for it, packages won't get included, etc.

However, if we do the right thing and remain 100% free, then we get the
entire community's support.  Meaning compiler engineers will debug our
compiler problems for us. :)  

The fact is, no matter what we choose, there will be bugs to fix now and
later.  Proprietary software is not free of bugs, it's just free of the
ability to fix it yourself _within_your_community_.

On Thu, 2004-09-30 at 14:03, Dave Pawson wrote:
> > So much for community development?
> 
> > Bye.

Dave, if this is truly a good-bye, I'm sorry to see you go.

You have brought a perspective and opinion that, at least, keeps us on
our toes.  I don't always agree with you, that's obvious, but I
appreciate your input, energy, focus, passion, community spirit, and
expertise.  On the last item, the project needs your contributions to
the present and future toolchain, whether done as part of this project,
or just in the work you do otherwise.

However, if you are not playing Devil's advocate or are just
troll-baiting for the fun of it, and you _truly_ disagree with these
simple fundamentals of free software development, then I can't see how
we can work together within the Fedora documentation project.

If there is something you are not understanding or appreciating about
free software and the reality of open source development, I will be
happy to continue to explain.  At the moment, it sounds as if we are at
an impasse, in that you disagree with the most basic concepts at the
heart of Fedora.

- Karsten
-- 
Karsten Wade, RHCE, Tech Writer
a lemon is just a melon in disguise
http://people.redhat.com/kwade/
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