Paul Shaffer wrote:
Mike made some good points effortlessly refuted by Les in rather non-specific terms (more news?), essentially illustrating for the umpteenth time, there is no viable middle ground for this discususion from a distro-philosophic standpoint.
Don't confuse two different rants. One, that code encumbered with GPL restrictions can never be distributed in useful forms where you also need the features provided by code under different terms in something that can be considered a combined work, is mostly rhetorical since it can't be changed - although it is something users need to understand.
The other and mostly-current rant is about usability issues that could be fixed. All commonly needed 3rd party components could be push-button installs; once installed they could keep working; security updates could make it reasonable to keep running older working versions until the worst bugs were fixed in the next update, etc., etc. This part becomes a value judgment on the tradeoff between development time that might be used on mechanics instead of usability and the loss of input from the users that are forced to some other OS. This part can have a middle ground and useful compromises.