[Ambassadors] Re: Fedora 11: What do we expect?

[Ashiqur Rahman Angel]

I don´t how, but there is going another conversation in same title in this
list. Please have a look there, I have replied, I think you missed it..
However here it´s,
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-ambassadors-list/2009-February/msg00024.html.

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 9:32 AM, David Nalley <david at gnsa.us> wrote:

> On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 12:22 PM, Joseph Smidt <josephsmidt at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >     I think we are attacking the wrong goal.  What people want is
> > that their OS "Just Works".
> >
> >     What Fedora really needs to do is find a legal way to make all of
> > these things "Just Work".  As long as the OS just works, newbies will
> > love it.
> >
> >      Most people don't care if their driver came from Nvidia or not,
> > as long as it just works and gives equal performance.
>
>
> This type of thread in general in my opinion illuminates the biggest
> philosophical difference between Fedora and Ubuntu.
>
> People, in general, do want their OS and applications to just work.
> They don't care about the technology or freedom.
>
> Fedora (and hopefully the vast majority, if not all of its
> contributors) do value freedom. The understand that one of the
> foundational goals that Fedora supports is Freedom. I am not on FESCo
> or the Fedora board, but I have to imagine that one of the main
> questions that those guys ask when faced with a decision is 'what's
> the impact to a users freedom?'
> I am of the opinion that you don't become more free by using,
> including, or advocating non-free software.
>
> Fedora, in my opinion, is rapidly becoming the standard-bearer for
> software freedom. Yes we tolerate binary blobs in firmware, but show
> me another distribution with the same dedication to freedom. The
> closest that I know of is gnewsense - and honestly they don't have
> anywhere near the footprint that Fedora or any other major
> distribution. Our stance on freedom has allowed us to even change some
> very large companies licensing agreements (Yahoo for instance
> http://www.zimbra.com/forums/announcements/19581-license-5-0-7-foss.html
> ).
>
> Honestly our goals are not necessarily to have the most users and even
> the biggest mindshare. Our goal is to further free software.
>
> I like the term that Rahul applied to us - Pragmatic Extremists
> http://rahulsundaram.livejournal.com/19456.html
>
> And in each of these suggestions - I think we need to ask if we are
> furthering freedom.  - if we aren't then such a suggestion violates
> one of our four foundations, and should probably be dismissed out of
> hand.
>
> Rather than working on what will be a huge uphill battle to add
> non-free things like binary drivers for video cards we should invest
> that effort in projects like nouveau.
>
> Unfortunately this seems to pop up about every 3-4 months, and this
> seems to be a growing pain with people. I recall having a very similar
> argument over the mp3 codec with Greg DeKoenigsberg and Alex Maier
> about 3 years ago. I don't know how you impress upon people the
> ideological importance of software freedom in a project like Fedora, I
> don't really even know how my viewpoint came to be different, though I
> do note that the more I contribute to an open source project the more
> important that I feel that it is. Perhaps we can find a good way to
> convey this in our mentoring efforts.
>
> --
> Fedora-ambassadors-list mailing list
> Fedora-ambassadors-list at redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-ambassadors-list
>



-- 
Angel
GPG key: 0x34001F46
Bangladesh Linux Users Alliance
Fedora Ambassador Bangladesh
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Angel

Fedora -- Freedom² and rapid innovation
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