[Fedora-marketing-list] What Is Fedora's Prime Directive?

[Rahul]

[Just a few quick notes]

> 
> A thought-provoking opinion.
> 
> My response:
> 
> Fedora users are free to use whatever software they like, including
> proprietary software. This necessarily will involve some hassle when
> Fedora ships 100% open source. I can see how the break proprietary
> video drivers with an update is inconvenient. However, holding back
> 7.1 is about the only thing that Fedora can do, and that holds the
> update schedule back. 


Not necessarily. With appropriate packaging, third party drivers can 
depend on older version of Xorg and we wont be breaking any systems at 
all. Besides packages are currently designed to fall back on the open 
source driver if a appropriate binary only driver is not present. If the 
user downloads the driver from the nvidia site directly, they might run 
into problems but we already advise users not to do that in our release 
notes.


> As to the desktop Linux world, if it's good and open source we want it
> in Fedora somehow. Beagle desktop search is in Fedora due to mono
> being developed elsewhere. I also have seen people run Novell's new
> main menu on Fedora (which I hope to see in Extras sometime).

That Red Hat ships code from the "competition" or vice versa is not news 
at all in the open source world. We are not having a dog chases cat war 
here. We all benefit from the cross vendor and community pollination.

I have personally pushed for the Novell Slab menu applet to be included 
in Fedora with our own modifications to integrate into Fedora tools etc 
in a better way and I am using the package in review in FC5 for sometime 
now. There is some nice work being done here.

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2006-July/msg00515.html
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=199681
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=200863

Rahul