On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 2:27 AM, Robert Scheck robert@fedoraproject.orgwrote:
On Sun, 01 Feb 2009, Ashiqur Rahman Angel wrote:
I didnt know this, Fedora's objective is, to make proprietary software installation difficult. If this is, then I am sorry for the mail, I dont have anything to say.
Speaking from the view of an ambassador, I hope, that you don't communicate ever such statements as above to users when acting as ambassador or when representing Fedora. Surely you didn't meant the sentence such hard as you have written it, nevertheless it seems you're lacking basics about Fedora.
What do you expect his reply when someone from project says him ¨You're not the first one to make these suggestions. Parroting them like a broken record isn't going to change any of the above. Sorry.¨
Dont you think, his sentence is also as hard as his?
Please read http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ForbiddenItems carefully in order to understand what Fedora is doing and why things are so as they are - and especially regarding proprietary software, there called "forbidden items".
The unlucky thing is, that third-party vendors are making the installation of their software unnecessarily hard by themself. So if they would license their software as open source, it would be much more easy to integrate them into Fedora or even ship their software, driver or whatelse as part of our Linux distribution.
I am wondering, how Ubuntu make this third-party repo and packages installation easier. If they can, why we can´t?
As ambassador your work around proprietary software should be to show stuff mentioned above to the Fedora users out there and explain them, that they need to get in touch with their closed source vendor and bother the vendor hard enough, that the licensing maybe gets changed or better integrateable (e.g. the vendor optimizes that by the use of own Fedora repositories) into Fedora and other Linux distributions.
Most important thing around is: Proprietary software itself must not be bad at all, I understand that companies need to make money. But if then a user complains about, he or she needs to get pointed by an ambassador to the cause of that. We can't solve things, we are not responsible for. Of course the people supporting RPM Fusion's non-free repository are doing a very well job. But nevertheless it would be better, if we wouldn't have need for such a repository at all - I think we all can agree on this.
So please get more involved into Fedora and try to get the lacking basics about Fedora. Ask people around the project, eg. Fedora Ambassadors, Fedora Ambassador Mentors or similar. This mailinglist can also be used to clarify such things, but avoid cross-posting over several mailing lists.
Finally, I didn't want to blame you at all here, futhermore trying to lower your current deficits. Hopefully you're getting it also that way - thanks.
Here I have to remind you one thing, did he say to add close source packages with Fedora? No he didn´t say it, he just wanted a easier solution of this. What Fedora really needs to do is find a legal way to make all of these things easier.