Fedora not "free" enough for GNU?

Alexandre Oliva aoliva at redhat.com
Mon Sep 22 18:29:35 UTC 2008


On Sep 21, 2008, "Stephen John Smoogen" <smooge at gmail.com> wrote:

> you expect them to follow you without question.

I'm not sure what leads you to this conclusion.  I can see reasons to
support the other claims, but not for this one.

I'm quite open to questioning (too open and too willing to answer, I
guess you'd all agree), and I'd be more than happy (too happy, indeed
:-) to answer questions as to my motivations, goals and positions.

What I seem to be facing is the exact opposite situation: (some)
people in charge are unhappy for being questioned on a decision that,
to me, doesn't make sense.

> unlike a good prophet you expect them to do the work for you. Make
> an Orange Sombrero or some hat from Brazil. Show that it can be done
> and maintained.. and then you will have something to point to.

Erhm...  I've *already* done the work, at least the part that others
hadn't done before, and I've already pointed at them a number of
times.

I've also offered to linux-libre packages for Fedora?  In fact, that
was the first thing I did when linux-libre came up.  And I've been
doing that ever since, although under the name freed-ora, because
Fedora proper rejected it.  You can see more info about the project
and maintenance at http://fsfla.org/selibre/linux-libre/freed-ora

As for actual distros, gNewSense and BLAG use linux-libre, and they
have since before I joined it.  Now there are more.  Besides, BLAG
happens to be based on Fedora, as you probably know, so there's little
point in creating yet another distro just to prove this point.  And
then, this would do little to liberate Fedora users.  You see, it
doesn't make much sense to try that elsewhere, given that the goal is
to improve Fedora.

I'm very surprised this meets so much resistence.  Even if my way of
presenting the suggestions causes strong antagonistic reactions, one
would think the stated goals of the project would eventually prevail
and dominate the feelings the things I write seem to evoke.

But they don't, and I can't quite understand why.


I can understand "we don't want a kernel-libre variant, we're just now
finally getting rid of the kernel-xen maintained separately, and it
still hurts".

I can understand "we don't want people's computers to stop working
because the non-Free firmware is gone", even though I don't quite
agree with this stance.  But I have no evidence that people who object
to this move even looked at the list of affected modules before
raising the objection.  And then, although back when this started a
few oddball components would indeed miss the firmwares, and be
disabled from the build because of that (which wouldn't stop people
from building the modules on their own), nowadays both kernel.org and
linux-libre's kernel sources let you ship the firmware separately, and
the modules will pick it up.

I can understand "we don't want to have more maintenance work because
of this issue", but this shouldn't be an issue when someone offers to
do the maintenance work for you.

I can understand "we don't want to diverge from upstream", but
tracking a slightly cleaned-up version that tracks upstream very
closely isn't quite diverging.

I can understand "we're concerned the project might just disappear and
then we'd be left out in the cold", but linux-libre tracks upstream so
closely as to be interchangeable, and the changes required to adopt it
(or to drop it) are no-brainers.

I can understand "we're not in a hurry, and upstream is taking care of
it for us", but there's no indication that upstream will follow
through or even is trying to address the same problem, and meanwhile
there is a solution that we could adopt right now, even if
temporarily, so this position comes off as "we don't care enough about
this".

I could understand if someone wrote "you attack us and disturb us, why
should we take your suggestions or your package?", but I'd hope
Fedora's decisions would at least try to separate the messenger from
the message.

I could understand if someone wrote "given your background and
political agenda, if it's you maintaining this package, then it must
be too radical for us", but given the considerations above, I'd
consider this foolish.

I could understand if someone wrote "look, we just don't want to do
this, shut the fsck up and go away", but the "don't want to" is a
consequence of the actual reasons, which are precisely what I'm trying
to understand.

What is it that I'm missing to understand the rejection of a Free
kernel for Fedora 10?

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
FSFLA Board Member       ¡Sé Libre! => http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}




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