ARTICLE - ESR gives up on Fedora

[Jon 'maddog' Hall]

> 
> > Part of ESR's latest statements in this letter have to do directly with
> > this issue.
> 
>   See the above request.  How?  What is the context?
> 

  * Effectively abandoning the struggle for desktop market share.
      * Failure to address the problem of proprietary multimedia formats
        with any attitude other than blank denial.

Fedora as a distribution has stayed pretty "pure" with respect to not
shipping what is defined by them to be "free".  Other distributions have
been a little less restrictive in this sense, and this causes these
distributions to be somewhat easier to install and use.

The argument, in my opinion, comes down to whether you satisfy the end
user with these non-free components, thus helping to make a better
desktop (and these are mostly seen in the desktop) market, or do you
leave them out to emphasize that the software is still not "free"?

> Richard DOES believe in gratis everything.
> 
No, I disagree.  Richard has never said that a programmer should not be
able to make money doing programming.  It is just that after the
programming is done, the software should be "free" as in "freedom".  A
side effect of this is that barring any other type of business model
this tends to make the software "gratis".  There is a lot to his
philosophy and it can not be stated in just a few lines.  I do not agree
with all of it, but I have moved closer to his side over the years.

> But personally, I
> feel that the changes for GPL v3 are changing the terms of a community
> license not for the betterment of Open Source and/or Free Software in
> general, but to solidify Richards 'new world order'.
> 
I also do not agree completely with the way that the GPL V3 license has
been done.  My personal belief is that there should have been work done
on a GPL V2.x to clean it up, bring it into the 21st century and THEN
address the issues that Richard is pushing.  I do believe that the
issues the GPL V3.0 are attacking are legitimate issues in Free
Software.  I do not agree with the path of treating them, but that is
where Richard and I (and a lot of other people) can continue to disagree
and discuss.

> I'm at a loss as to why this would apply to Eric stating to a
> community that he feels he's part of that a frustrating mistake was
> made, and he's going to another distro.  Would it have been a better
> approach to unsubscribe, and simply hop on over to Ubuntu lists and
> start working?  I felt his point was well made, and simular to points
> other Linux users have made on lists all over the world for years.
> 
Let's just say it is a matter of the style in how he did it, and I think
enough people have commented on that, both pro and con.

md