Free Software audit update

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Wed, 2006-08-23 at 08:40 -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Ralf Corsepius (rc040203 at freenet.de) said: 
> > >  Fedora's insistence on using only F/OSS while
> > > being (mostly) user-friendly is one of its greatest strong points, IMHO.
> > > It shows how beneficial such licensing can be, and is a perfect example
> > > of a stable and secure, yet highly-updated distribution.
> >
> > Well, if Fedora continues the way it currently does, it'll soon be
> > unusable for me, which would force me to quit.
> 
> What specific software that wouldn't be available is causing this
> opinion for you?
Fedora itself - My initial motivation to participate in Fedora was to
tailor a disto to my specific needs, to share this works with others and
to mutually benefit from others doing the same, hoping Fedora would
evolve into a distro meeting individual users demands better than RHL
did.

Now, I feel this expectations to fail. Instead, I feel Fedora is being
(ab-) used as a means for a "religious crusade", overall causing Fedora
to be gradually crippled and becoming less usable.

>  Just openmotif? Something else?
No, removing OpenMotif to me simply is an incident of "zealots throwing
a major road block at me". It means a major obstacle and increased
divergence from my personal needs as a developer. As user, I find other
changes non-helpful, but this would be a different discussion.

> I'm not convinced that opnemotif is even that great for older third-party
> apps, considering it's changed the abi a couple of times from the 'original'
> release.
Well, your doubts are partially justified. This occasionally has been an
issue in the past, but in practice rarely is an issue these days. 
The impact other changes (e.g. the restructured X11, GCC changes) have
on older code, in most cases outweigh the impact of Motif-API changes.

Ralf