Double dare ya, Fedora! And your art sucks!

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, Casimiro de Almeida Barreto <casimiro.barreto at gmail.com> said:
>   1. RedHat/Fedora people are absolutelly unable to deal with major
>      manufacturers (Adobe for Instance) and have good versions of
>      Flash/Shockwave and (Apple) Quicktime. Curious thing is that  my
>      Apple Mini (a real wonder) runs OS X Tiger (that is a *NIX system)
>      and has no problems with flash, shockwave or PDF files... as well
>      as don't have problems with device drivers.

First of all, there are multiple PDF readers (and creators) included in
Fedora Core.

Guess what: the commercial Red Hat Enterprise Linux includes Adobe
Acrobat Reader, RealPlayer, Flash, and Java (from IBM and BEA).  Red Hat
is perfectly able to "deal" with those companies for commercial
redistribution licenses.

However, a primary goal of the Fedora Core distrobution is to create a
free, Open Source OS that is also freely redistributable.  None of the
above software falls into that category.  Part of the reason the Red Hat
Linux distro was changed to Fedora was that even Red Hat Linux wasn't
fully freely redistributable (due to Red Hat's trademarks).

Anyone can download Fedora Core DVD images, burn (or master) them, and
sell them (for a profit if they like).  If you put an MP3 decoder in
there, that will no longer be the case (at least in the US).

> The java that comes along with GCC runs only about 10-20% of Java 
> Applications in market. Want examples: try to access any Brazilian bank 
> using "Fedora standard Java". You'll get stuck... But why would people 
> try to access his bank acount from his own computer? A little walk is 
> healthy... So each loving soul under the Sun have to download Sun JRE 
> (at least) or the complete JDK.

I don't think you are going to access any Java web site with Fedora (out
of the box) at the moment as the gcj plugin is not yet included.  For
other Java apps, Bugzilla reports are welcome.

Fedora cannot include Sun's JDK due to Sun's license terms.  If you want
that changed, I suggest you complain to Sun, not Fedora.

> Flash for Linux literally sucks... it is 
> slow, and again there is no support for shockwave.

Fedora cannot include Flash due to Macromedia's license terms.  If you
want that changed, I suggest you complain to Macromedia.  Macromedia
hasn't even written Shockwave support for Linux, so you'll need to
complain to Macromedia about that (Fedora definately cannot include
software that has not been written).

> In software market everything is gray zone. You issue MySql and AFAIK it 
> is not really "open source", but them you stripe it (so RHEL can have 
> the full flavour and the others don't).

Wrong.  MySQL is released under the GPL (that's about as Open Source as
you can get).

> Result: I upgraded a server in 20 minutes and everything stoped 
> to work... that meant 20+ hours of straight work of coding and recoding 
> (man, I had to code calendar months and other stupid things) to have the 
> basics running back.

What kind of idiot upgrades a production server without any testing in
advance?

-- 
Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.