Xorg 1.5 missed the train?

[Josh Boyer]

On Tue, 20 May 2008 18:38:37 -0700
"Christopher Stone" <chris.stone at gmail.com> wrote:

> >> According to this thread it seems pretty simple actually:
> >>
> >> http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=188645
> >
> > Sure.  Creating them locally is simple.  Then all you'd have to do is
> > get it past review, get the primary Xorg maintainer to agree, and
> > support it for the entire release.  Which includes handling all the bug
> > reports for it.  Which you might get a lot of and won't be able
> > to do a damn thing about because of binary drivers.
> 
> I don't give a hoot if the packages are supported or not, I just want
> an easy way to get my nVidia card working.  All you people do is gripe

You have a way.  You even pointed it out to me.  Do what is posted in
that forum and you have your solution.  Why are you continuing to
bother us?

> and moan about how much work it would be and all this and that.  Look,
> its just a matter of adding rpms to a repo, make an "unsupported" repo
> if you have to.  The bottom line is you want to have as many people
> testing the OS as possible.

No.  The bottom line is that Fedora does not care about, cater to, or
promote binary drivers.  Period.

> > Maintaining free software is like having a kid.  Anyone can make it,
> > but it takes someone that actually cares to maintain it well.
> 
> And obviously ajax does not care about 50% of Fedora's user base.  It

You pulled that number out of your ass.  And it's wrong.  You have no
data to back that up, and what data does exist on smolts.org shows ATI
has a lead.

> would seem to me that he is not being a good maintainer, I hope he
> raises his kids better than he maintains xorg.

He raises his "kids" just fine.  He makes no claims for nVidia's "kids"
though.

Seriously, he can't even begin to do anything about a driver that isn't
open sourced.

> >> If redhat wants to pay me $100k a year, I'll happily make xorg compat
> >> rpms in about one day.  Thank you very much.
> >
> > I believe that shows your fundamental lack of understanding about
> > Fedora and open source software on many levels.
> 
> I believe you have no idea what you are talking about.  If I

You can believe whatever the hell you want.  That doesn't make it true.

> maintained a package which I knew was not going to work with 50% of
> the users hardware, and I was being paid to maintain this package,
> then I certainly would spend some time to allow those 50% a way to use
> their hardware with the rest of the OS.  Nothing more to it than that,
> it has nothing to do with open source, it has everything to do with
> being professional.

1) It goes against the goals of Fedora, so it's not being
unprofessional.

2) The maintainer's employment status should have no bearing on this
argument whatsoever.  What if the Xorg maintainer were a community
volunteer, like 2/3 of our other packages?

3) If you're that pissed off about it, call nVidia and complain.  Do
something useful rather than yelling at people that provide you with
pretty darn good software and don't ask for anything in return.

josh