LWN headline: Blame Fedora = High Praise

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Apr 30, 2007, Rahul Sundaram <sundaram at fedoraproject.org> wrote:

> Alexandre Oliva wrote:
>> Once more time, I'm not talking about the firmware in the kernel.
>> 
>> That's harder to remove, I agree.  One has to get out of one's way to
>> do that.

> Just pointing out that you are drawing a line between firmware inside
> the kernel and firmware outside of it while Fedora is drawing a line
> between firmware and other forms of proprietary software.

i) I'm not.  The FSF did, and did it a while ago, before even thinking
about removing stuff from the kernel was thinkable.

ii) The line is not between what's acceptable and what's not.  In time,
all such non-Free firmware will be removed from the 100% Free distros,
because they are committed to Freedom.  If not, we'll know they
aren't, and the FSF will likely take them out of the list.

iii) Failing to take something bad out that is in and very technically
difficult to remove is very different from adding something bad that
wasn't in and will be very politically difficult to remove.  The
former comes off as lack of manpower.  The latter comes off as lack of
commitment.

> Atleast in Fedora the division is clearly documented in the
> packaging guidelines.

Which is and has always been incompatible with the stated goals of the
Fedora project.

Now, while it was there but wasn't exercised, it was bad but not
terrible.  Now that it is exercised, we're basically telling pure Free
Software activists to go away.  Is this the goal?  To trade each pure
Free Software user for 1048576 freedom-unconcerned users?  :-(

> You need to bring this up Fedora 7 launch. Now is too late to be
                           ^after
> making changes for this release.

Well, yeah, but is this a frank argument?  Was it too late already
when I first brought it up?  Was it too late already when I last did
before this time?

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
FSF Latin America Board Member         http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}