Honestly as hard as i know it is for people to let go of a feeling of 'vengance', no where in my post did i mention anything related to 'non opensource'.

I know some of this thread was about nvidia drivers related to xorg 7.1, however please, keep an open mind to what people are trying to say. if not the bitterness you feel for one subject will make you blind to other wisdoms.

As Hans's thread read "this is *NOT* about the aiglx/nvidia example", very few people seemed to grasp this concept, and thought his only intrest was to fuel an ever expanding flame war? Not so .. there was a very good different point in there, that had nothing to do with the 'open source vs not open source drivers' debate.

As is the same with this editorial, and discussions on digg/slashdot..

The point i was trying to illustrate (and mentioned before in a few of my posts), is that we shouldn't loose focus on the spit-and-polish, keeping the end users in mind, not losing our ever important market and more importantly, mind share..

Maybe we truly disagree on the goals and target audiance for Fedora.. In my mind, i want to help make Fedora great (and contribute to it to for this reason) to make it something very pleasant and easy to use for the end-users.

While i know Fedora completely dominates in the technical area (how could it not with some of the finest developers, lots of glibc and gcc developers, and creator of many such great new programs such as the 'gnome-power-manager', etc), what else is technical goodness then a tool to support a different end goal .. making things possible for the end users, making things easier, enabling whole generations of people to do things, they otherwise would not have been able to do! Grow and develop open source development, allow business users to do their thing, allow home users to play with video, music, movies and other 'leasure' programs as they see fit, allow universities to have hundreds to thousands of desktops used for research, without being constrained and/or limited by Microsoft (or other) taxes, allowing children to grow up being able to hack their first python or c program, and even contributing to the OLPC program to allow millions of children access to more information and better education. To me thats freedom, not only as beer, but also freedom by being enabled, freedom of speech, freedom of choice, freedom to develop passions and to excel in this world

For Fedora to feed these possibilities in the world, technical superiority is a great starting point, but not the end. To make children, new computer users and people who want to switch from other systems 'love' fedora and enable all these things in their lives, more is needed ... spit and polish, easily usable software, a consistent and well thought out platform and applications.

SuSe is definatly trying to move this way with their 'betterdesktop.com' initiative, Ubuntu showed us there is a craving and a market for such things, OLPC shows us Redhat (and many others) care greatly about such things too.

So no this thread was not a necro-digg to try to re-light an old discussion, it was send hoping that after a few days of rest people might be open to a different discussion.

Clearly by your (and Sean's) reactions, i failed miserably in this, however i hope its not to late yet to turn this around

    -- Chris Chabot

seth vidal wrote:
On Wed, 2006-08-02 at 12:46 -0400, Sean wrote:
  
On Wed, 02 Aug 2006 18:10:04 +0200
Chris Chabot <chabotc@xs4all.nl> wrote:

    
An interesting editorial on this topic, that might sum up some of the 
feelings that some people have been feeling:

http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/editorial_13

Slashdot discussion on this: 
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/02/0238233
Digg discussion: 
http://digg.com/linux_unix/Why_Red_Hat_will_go_bust_because_of_Ubuntu

All of this isn't necessarily to be taken as gospel, however  it does 
illustrate well the point some of 'us' have been trying to make .. lets 
not forget about the users! :-)
      
Agreed, let us not forget about the open source users.  Let's not let the
people who want to use binary-only proprietary extension spoil the
distribution for those that don't.  On top of which, the first article
you cite seems to indicate that the niche you're worried about is
already nicely filled by Ubuntu.  There doesn't seem to be much
reason for Fedora to become just another Ubuntu.
    

I know I'm not the typical user - but I got involved with fedora and
with linux in general b/c of open source.

I don't want to work on a distribution that isn't sticking to those
ideals.

The only two distros I can think of that follow that extremely closely
are fedora and debian.

ubuntu is definitely not one of them.

Thank you for making this point.

-sv