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

[Robert Scheck]

On Sun, 01 Feb 2009, Ashiqur Rahman Angel wrote:
> I didnt know this, Fedora's objective is, to make proprietary software
> installation difficult. If this is, then I am sorry for the mail, I dont
> have anything to say.

"The Fedora Project is out front for you, leading the advancement of free,
open software and content." - I can't read "proprietary software" there at
all. As the sentence of our homepage says, we're focussed to free software
and content, not to proprietary and closed source stuff.

Speaking from the view of an ambassador, I hope, that you don't communicate
ever such statements as above to users when acting as ambassador or when
representing Fedora. Surely you didn't meant the sentence such hard as you
have written it, nevertheless it seems you're lacking basics about Fedora.

Please read http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ForbiddenItems carefully in order
to understand what Fedora is doing and why things are so as they are - and
especially regarding proprietary software, there called "forbidden items".

The unlucky thing is, that third-party vendors are making the installation
of their software unnecessarily hard by themself. So if they would license
their software as open source, it would be much more easy to integrate them
into Fedora or even ship their software, driver or whatelse as part of our
Linux distribution.

As ambassador your work around proprietary software should be to show stuff
mentioned above to the Fedora users out there and explain them, that they
need to get in touch with their closed source vendor and bother the vendor
hard enough, that the licensing maybe gets changed or better integrateable
(e.g. the vendor optimizes that by the use of own Fedora repositories) into
Fedora and other Linux distributions.

Most important thing around is: Proprietary software itself must not be bad
at all, I understand that companies need to make money. But if then a user
complains about, he or she needs to get pointed by an ambassador to the
cause of that. We can't solve things, we are not responsible for. Of course
the people supporting RPM Fusion's non-free repository are doing a very
well job. But nevertheless it would be better, if we wouldn't have need for
such a repository at all - I think we all can agree on this.

So please get more involved into Fedora and try to get the lacking basics
about Fedora. Ask people around the project, eg. Fedora Ambassadors, Fedora
Ambassador Mentors or similar. This mailinglist can also be used to clarify
such things, but avoid cross-posting over several mailing lists.

Finally, I didn't want to blame you at all here, futhermore trying to lower
your current deficits. Hopefully you're getting it also that way - thanks.


Greetings,
  Robert