On Sun, 2006-01-22 at 21:35, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
Can you or can you not use the VMware image without VMWare player? . If it cannot be used with a proprietary application then the vmware image is proprietary.
I thought I had seen something about the disk image being the same as those for qemu but was never motivated enough to find out what that means.
It might be available for gratis or you might able to backup or redistribute it even but as long as the content in the image is unusable without a proprietary application it is definitely a proprietary piece of software.
Is a tar image proprietary because you have to load it back on proprietary hardware before it runs again? I'd expect a tar<->vmware file converter to be possible and don't see a lot of difference in principle.
Thats the best I can explain it. I am not sure anybody here is going to support your argument that somehow VMWare images are non proprietary. I will drop this discussion here since I dont have anything further to explain on this particular issue. Thanks
As long as someone else does a good job of maintaining the images it doesn't really matter. If they don't, perhaps we could skirt the notion that copying onto a certain file format somehow makes the content proprietary by having a person with fedora expertise supply a kickstart file and a script of yum commands to build and maintain something that would give a desirable first impression of the current state of the project. Someone who isn't offended by free-as-in-gratis can do the rest without knowing what the ideal fedora setup of the day looks like or how to build it.