[Ambassadors] The 4f-problematic of Fedora.

David Anderson dca at projectcellular.com
Fri Dec 18 13:03:03 UTC 2009


>Hi all,
>
>I have some problems with the definitions of the 4f's.
>
>friends - this is a clear thing , we are all friends, the world is
>pink and there are no conflicts (until proven otherwise)
>
>features - is a clear thing to, fedora is a distribution huge amount
>of features (perhaps not enough features ;-) we need more).
>
>first - there is my first problem. This is like a racing duel with
>other distributions. We can not win on all sectors. This is more a
>destination, our goal.... We WANT to be the first, but we are not
>always the first.
>
Look at it this way:  there's really no difference between Fedora, openSUSE, Ubuntu, & Mandriva.  Maybe, circa 2006 it was a little different, but today not so much. Only differentiators would be things like YaST, MCC, Ubuntu Software Center, etc.  Other than that?  What Fedora/RH has is a lot of the features that all these distro(s) share whether used as a desktop or server were originally either written by RH/Fedora dev (NetworkManager, etc) or first implemented in Fedora (PulseAudio). It's not bragging rights, it's just the way it is.  Should 'First' have been used in the creedo, I dunno'?
>
>freedom - This one is my biggest problem. What's the definition of freedom?
>The definition of freedom, which was definied by the FSF, formed the
>understanding of freedom in the whole world. And the FSF (Richard
>Stallman himself) said, that fedora is not free. So what's the current
>understanding of freedom in the fedoraproject?
>I haven't found arguments to discuss with someone about it.
>
Not to sound pragmatic, but the whole 'freedom' thing has gone out the window.  'Free' as in beer, 'free' as in no cost, 'freedom' as in no closed binaries or other odd-licensed modules, etc, etc. Thanks to companies like IBM, Intel, ATI, AMD, (note: who have contributed to the linux kernel) and the like have changed it where GNU/Linux is now a viable, supportable, extensible, dependable OS that can scale from calculators, to set-top TV boxes, to large big-iron mainframes.  As things go, thanks to the GPL at least the GNU/Linux as an OS concept (not so much the delivered product) is pretty much as close to free as anything.  
 
I really don't think the 4 F's were meant or intended to create some political kind of movement, all things considered I think it is as close to a good jist or marketing slogan for new user(s) as you can get.  Not to mention, 'Linux for human beings' was already taken. hehe.
>-- 
>Josephine "Fine" Tannhäuser
>2.6.31.5-127.fc12.i686.PAE
>
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