On Mon, November 22, 2004 4:42 pm, Denis Leroy said:
So my question was: shouldn't Fedora stand in the middle ?
Shouldn't
it be the job of putting together a desktop-oriented distribution
precisely to coordinate the efforts of the various "forces" out there
(a hard and thankless job IMO), and reach compromises in order to
provide the best possible desktop experience. This has nothing to do
with kernel development, but rather in picking the right features to
use in that kernel without breaking the most popular components,
coordinating schedules and releases with said components, to make sure
a Fedora Core release doesn't break the Nvidia drivers (one of those
most popular components, whether you like it or not) or doesn't happen
one week before Firefox 1.0 is released. Isn't there somebody in the
Fedora community (whether he/she's a RedHat employee or not) that
Is Fedora supposed to be "desktop-oriented", should its developers be
worried about working with closed-source "forces"? Here's what an Fedora
webpage says,
http://fedora.redhat.com/about :
"The goal of The Fedora Project is to work with the Linux community to
build a complete, general purpose operating system ****exclusively****
from open source software." [nb. **excessive** emphasis added]
If there are enough people worried about one or more binary blobs, then an
independent support-community should be easy to organize which wouldn't
need assistance from those who are completely uninterested in such
efforts.
should be working on this ? His/her job would include calling Nvidia
and saying something like this "Hi, i work on the Fedora distro. Even
though our kernel developers hate you, half of our users use your
drivers and we'd rather not break it for our next release. Is there
anything we can do?". To which there is or isn't of course, but at
least somebody's gotta try...
If you volunteer your services, it would be an interesting experiment.
Changes are usually telegraphed far enough in advance (through rawhide,
etc) that it shouldn't be a big surprise when issues arise.
Sean