Fedora - DELL ?

[Arthur Pemberton]

On 3/15/07, Lyvim Xaphir <knightmerc at yahoo.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-03-14 at 23:12 -0600, David G. Miller wrote:
> > "Paul Osunero" <esiex3 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > The discussion at the dell blog shows that people really want Ubuntu first,
> > > Fedora second, and Suse third out of the big three.  To be honest, Ubuntu
> > > makes more sense because they'll have legal codecs from Linspire's CNR and
> > > they have commercial support.  Fedora lacks these things right now...
>
>
> > The best thing Dell could do for FOSS would be to offer systems that are
> > fully supported (hardware) by open source drivers.
>
> The point however is that this is _not_ the best thing to do either for
> the users (who actually need functionality) and the owners of
> intellectual property rights.  Programmers and companies have the right
> to license their own work the way they see fit, simply because that if
> by definition it is _their_ work, then it is theirs.  Period.  They have
> the right to protect their own work, and if a profit is to be made and
> they are to get rightful compensation for their ideas, this protection
> will never be provided by the GPL.  GPLv2 is only the right thing for
> freely given work, not for intellectual property that needs protecting.
>
> Up until relatively recently, different licenses co-existed just fine
> under GPLv2.  If a user wanted to load binary drivers, he did; his
> choice, his machine, his software.  His house, his truck, et cetera.
> The user was the master of his own ideological domain with regards to
> licensing.  But that freedom of choice, both by the user and by the
> owners of intellectual property rights, is threatened by a kernel
> message, inserted by Greg KH and Andrew Morton, which says that
> non-GPL'd licensed drivers will be "disallowed" since they are
> "tainted".
>
> This wasn't a decision that was discussed among the members of the Linux
> community, it's not something that was voted in by several user
> populations of different distros, as a matter of fact there was no
> consultation made to the community at all; it was a decision made behind
> closed doors by two or more developers, ON YOUR BEHALF.  In other words,
> you, I, nor nobody else except them had any say in this.  Since a social
> mindset leads ultimately to elitism and dictatorship, it's not at all
> surprising to me that there was no democracy about this.  Furthermore,
> it was not a decision of technical merit, it was an ideological
> decision, and as I've said before, ideological decisions are the sole
> purview of the user and not the developer.  The developer by definition
> is to concern himself with the technical merit of existing GPL'd code
> with which he is associated (as opposed to forcing licensing on the
> public regarding code he has no rights to). The developer has no right
> to push ideological views onto the user, the programmers, and the
> companies, which essentially is what this kernel threat is doing. The
> key point is that the users are making a statement to the latter right
> now as we speak by choosing Ubuntu over Fedora.
>
>
> LX
> --

You can stop now, I said I was sorry.

-- 
Fedora Core 6 and proud