On 08/17/2010 03:22 AM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 8:01 PM, Manuel Wolfshant
<wolfy(a)nobugconsulting.ro> wrote:
> Do you REALLY believe that in a world where 90% of the desktops are
> Windows, where 2 thirds of the browser market is shared by IE and safari
> and where making governments to share public documents in a public
> format rather than .doc/.xls/etc, web site managers would care if you
> stop visiting their site ( which you probably NEED to access otherwise
> you would not be trying to visit it in the first place) ?
>
[snip]
I don't agree with the suggestions here to restrict it, but I think
the implications here sucks.
Is it better to have a world where 90% is Fedora but every user has
less freedom over their data and applications than they would in
windows because they are only using Fedora as a really excellent
remote terminal to web applications which give them no control over
their data or the programs that they use?
Disallowing compatibility with the world doesn't fix it but neither
does ignoring the significant problems posed by non-free web
applications and the enormous influence they will have over the fedora
experience in the coming decades.
Or in other words— for those who care about freedom making Fedora a
first class platform for web apps is mostly just rearranging the deck
chairs on the titanic— we're screwed either way.
To cut it short: I love freedom and this is why I use linux for 16 years
now (despite starting my professional career as a DOS / windows
programmer). But I do not write the rules and I prefer to have time to
see a movie or have a long weekend rather than chasing video / audio /
browser plugins. When I can, I advise against using proprietary /
non-free formats. But that is not always a choice and experience has
shown me that commercial companies most usually that not don't give a
**** on my opinion when I mail them to tell them " your site looks like
c**p in anything else but IE ".
As a sidenote, on my home WS ( centos5 /x86_64) I still have to use
adobe's flash plugin v9. Since upgrading to most recent firefox version
as provided by the distro, with v10 all I get is a black rectangle
instead of the clip. While on my work WS, firefox from RHEL6b2 /x86_64
after some period of usage (counted in dozens of minutes at most) must
be restarted or it simply does not react to any JS inside the pages.