Fedora Desktop future- RedHat moves

[Craig White]

On Sat, 2008-04-26 at 11:45 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> Craig White wrote:
> 
> >>>>> It was never part of the kernel  - just a victim of the ever-changing 
> >>>> Linux interfaces.  There were eventually patches to fix it, but fedora 
> >>>> never bothered to pick them up or even add openvpn which would have been 
> >>>> a usable replacement.
> >>> ----
> >>> been so long that I have forgotten the reason but I know that it was
> >>> simultaneous to migration to 2.6 kernel that occurred with FC2.
> >>>
> >>> anyway...openvpn is indeed available...
> >>
> >> I guess I gave up looking for it after only a few years...
> > ---
> > the impatience of youth...
> 
> Remote offices have this thing about not liking to be down for years.
----
thankfully there are people with vision and knowledge that can navigate
these troubled waters.
----
> > Sometimes I think you just bitch for the sake of bitching.
> 
> In this case I brought it up as the counterpoint to someone who said 
> that proprietary software could be abandoned and leave you hanging. 
> That's not unique to proprietary software, and even if it were it's not 
> an OS distribution's business to protect you from it other than by 
> making it easy to use alternatives.  Likewise, I'll bring up linux 
> firewire support compared the Mac's anytime someone tries to say that 
> proprietary drivers are always bad.  It's not about bitching so much as 
> a reality check for other people's lies supporting their own agendas.
----
ah but you're missing one teensy, weensy bit of information here...that
you actually have the source code so you can continue to use it even
when it becomes orphaned. With proprietary software, you don't have the
source code, you cannot rebuild it when the OS changes, you cannot fix
bugs, you are left completely out to dry. What you're really complaining
about is that Fedora stopped packaging cipe but that never precluded you
from packaging it yourself and maintaining it yourself.

I think you need to talk to Real World Accounting users in order to
consider the real ramifications when the proprietary software you are
using ceases to exist to get real perspective. If Microsoft succeeds in
taking over Yahoo...you're likely to see the vaporization of Zimbra. The
dangers of committing to proprietary software should never be
diminished.

I recognize your point about firewire but it has worked for me whenever
I used my combo firewire/usb hard drive and my earlier iPod which used
firewire. I do recall reading about some issues with firewire but never
had to confront them directly so I can't say that I noticed. I think the
firewire issue is somewhat off point.

Craig