ARTICLE - ESR gives up on Fedora

[Thomas Charron]

On 2/22/07, Jon 'maddog' Hall <maddog at li.org> wrote:
> >   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.

  And be able to do some core desktop features.  Like say..  Play MP3
files..  :-D  (Which I believe is the last format issue ESR spoke up
regarding).

  Another point that you've just brought up is that there are, in
certain cases, no easy to use alternatives for purely 'free' software,
which I also believe is one of the points of contention between ESR
and the AC/RMS.

> > 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.

  I guess the crux of the issue is the utopian view of the way things
could be if we where not in a capitalist world (ok, not the whole
world, but our side of it anyway).  I always find ESR seems to
basically agree, but at the same time say, 'But we're in real life..'

> > 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.

  Until he releases it.  Do you really feel RMS will give up on some
of the changes he's pushed?  Personally, I've done work for embedded
systems that can run Open Source software.  The support nightmare for
people who screw with the devices, then 'put back' the stock version
of the software would be a nightmare, and would generally cause me to
shy away from using ANY such software, which I suspect other
developers and hardware manufacturers to do the same, in a sense,
killing a growth path twards the 'Utopian' environment.  I seriously
consider Richard and his supports at the brink of making a
catastrophic mistake, which affects all 'open' software, be it Free or
Open.

> > 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.

  True enough.

-- 
-- Thomas