Fedora's way forward

[Rahul Sundaram]

On Thu, 2006-03-30 at 16:56 -0500, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
>  Make no mistake -- my dreams are as radical as those of
> anyone here, it's just that I am ruthlessly pragmatic about the 
> path by which we get there.

I would say that idea that we can produce a useful operating system and
a great end user experience purely using Free and open source software
is way more radical than people who believe they must co mingle
proprietary software to achieve that goal. Too many people have already
done that and some of them are successful with that approach too. 


> 
> I don't care how we implement the codec support; whether it's through
> shipping proprietary code until the patents run out, or pointing users
> at third-party repositories that have made deals with the likes of the
> Fraunhofer Institute...whatever.  That's a *detail*.

Yes in the grand scheme of things it might be a trivial implementation
detail but it's a very important detail from the project perspective. If
you are talking about implementing better support for helping the user
add additional repositories, great. I am all for it. If you are talking
about making it easier to access for people to access any software,
again that's  cool. If you are talking about shipping proprietary
software within Fedora then I dont agree with that goal. Make your
improvements generic enough to serve all software and not just the
proprietary ones and Fedora should be able to ship that improvement
quite easily. Thanks in advance.


Rahul