FC4 does not work, "out of the box" for me; GUI/X11 fails

[Les Mikesell]

On Tue, 2005-11-01 at 11:53, Craig White wrote:

> > I like open source, but it should be a matter of choice whether you
> > give your work away or not.  We need a way to let them keep that
> > freedom of choice while still being able to use their product. They
> > are going to a great effort trying to give away free binaries yet
> > the OS distribution continues to make it difficult for them.
> ----
> I thought that commitment to open source and not distributing software
> with restrictive licensing to be a virtue.

It's a religion. Attempting to force others to give away their
work doesn't agree with mine.  Choosing to give away your work
is fine, but if it isn't your choice it can't be much of a virtue.
You can pick your own religion, but if you are going to justify
it to others, pick some real examples and follow them through.

>  That puts pressure on those
> who want to come to the dance to dress according to the rules.

People pushing their religion on others has often caused problems...
The big problem here is that the GPL concept makes it next to
impossible to fairly spread the development cost of something
new over the appropriate set of users. 

> I don't want to dis on Adobe/Real Networks/nVidia/ATI/Sun et al. They
> have every right to hold on to their source and only distribute binaries
> for free as they wish, they just don't get included with source only
> distributions. 

Source makes sense for things of general interest where a lot of
people will work to improve it.  Device drivers should be written
once by someone who understands the hardware and never touched again.
If you poke around, I think you'll see lots of examples of
source-available drivers that were done by one, and only one person.
In the unfortunate case of that person's demise or change of interests
they were abandoned or languished a long time before anyone else
picked them up.  

> If third party efforts exist to script the download and install of these
> binary only distributions to make life easier for users, then I am all
> for it but the distribution itself isn't going to bother with it. 

It's one thing to have to make an effort. It's something else to have
the distribution arbitrarily break driver API's in their updates without
arranging for the replacement to already be available.  I don't see how
anyone can consider or recommend such a distribution for anything more
than a testbed.  It is fun to play with, though...

> I sort
> of like the idea of having users take the extra efforts to get the
> binary only software installed so they at least recognize that there is
> a distinction.

Yes, especially if they notice that the distinction is that the people
who build the hardware do a better job of writing the drivers.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com