to autodownload or not to autodownload

Matej Cepl mcepl at redhat.com
Mon Feb 11 09:09:24 UTC 2008


On Sat, 09 Feb 2008 13:00:08 +0100, Valent Turkovic scripst:
> I tested swfdec in detail and I find it useless for general online usage
> today. Offcourse that it will get impoved and I welcome the day I can
> use it instead of proprietary ones, but that day is not today
> unfortunatelly. And in order to use swfdec you still need unlegalized
> fedora packages from livna if you didn't know.

Valent,

I believe you mean it well, but there are many people on this thread who 
are in free software (or open software, whatever) world much longer than 
you seemed to be. We all heard the message "this free software is so far 
piece of shit, let's include this proprietary one, or the sky will fall 
on our head (or every Fedora user will move to Ubuntu/openSuSE; that's 
the last version of such fear), and meanwhile hopefully somebody else 
will develop the free one". And very certainly there are only two 
outcomes of this, depending on the decision made in the fork.

a) people will keep a stiff upper lip and fight the problems with the 
free software until we have one (I didn't believe half a year ago, that I 
can actually have free codec which works reasonably well with YouTube, 
even when I was talking with swfdec conference about it), or
b) we use proprietary software and the free one dies horrible death by 
neglect and lack of interest. The result is we are no better than before.

Unfortunately, the main point is -- THERE IS NOBODY ELSE THAN US! If we 
won't use the free software, nobody will. If you have to use proprietary 
software, go and use it, if you need Windows, go and use them (that's no 
sneering at you, I really mean it -- if you need to use now the stuff 
which is proprietary only, go and use it -- you know how, anyway; no bad 
feeling on my side).

But please don't make it easy to use proprietary software inside of 
Linux, and especially don't push for putting bad (so far bad, hopefully) 
free software on the back burner. It will never get cooked there.

I know and perfectly understand that a lot of free software when it 
starts is pretty poor quality comparing to its proprietary competitors -- 
hey, I was around when Gnome 1.0.* was the last word on really really 
free desktop -- ask anybody who was then around how horrible piece of 
sh..t Enlightment was then. It was actually so bad, that it made me to 
use KDE for the next seven years. Morale of this story is somehow 
confused, because /somebody else/ stick with Gnome even when it was bad 
as it was and make it working, but the point is that there are many 
projects (Amaya, Mozilla, and many many less known others) which never 
got enough traction and died horrible death, because people stick with 
their proprietary competitors while the free software was really bad 
(both Amaya and Mozilla/Seamonkey are still around, but thet never grown 
to be as useful as they might be, IMHO).

My thoughts are probably too confused in the moment to write it well, so 
I rather stop.

Matěj

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