On Mon, Oct 13, 2008 at 9:39 PM, Chris Weyl cweyl@alumni.drew.edu wrote:
What does it say about freedom, when we say "Use Fedora and be free! ...except, you know, how you want to." Why are we spending so much time and effort saying no, instead of getting out of the way of those who are interested in doing it and watching it succeed or fail on its merits?
"We" are saying no because "they" want "us" to do something, rather than doing it themselves. All of the software that goes into producing Fedora is free (in both the Beer and Speech senses). What *isn't* free is the infrastructure that goes into producing Fedora releases (the power/cooling/bandwidth/hardware as well as the time of the various employees and volunteers). *I* think that Red Hat has been extremely generous in letting us use that infrastructure to build a cool distribution like Fedora.
But why should Red Hat (and those of us that believe in the current Fedora mission) let that infrastructure and perhaps more importantly the Fedora brand get used for some "Fedora LTS" project? Based upon the failure of the Fedora Legacy project and the most recent discussion there are only a few people interested in volunteering their time to such a project. And from what I've seen in this latest discussion the LTS project goals are either ill-defined or overambitious or both.