On Monday 29 October 2007, Anders Karlsson wrote:
Thus, Les Mikesell at Mon Oct 29 22:07:52 2007 inscribed:
> I think you misunderstood. I said closed source - as opposed to Linux -
> doesn't change driver interfaces often. With Linux the kernel changes
> continuously but it is up to the distribution what is shipped. RHEL
> maintains something stable. Fedora doesn't.
The support and the ABI/API stability is part of what you pay for with
your subscription with RHEL. You pay nothing for Fedora. Stop trying
to turn Fedora in to RHEL or CentOS, they have different purposes and
goals.
What Les would like is a Fedora on a more stable (as in driver/module INTERNAL
API).
The discussion always seems to morph here, for some reason. CentOS/RHEL
provide API stability (in general) across the entire OS, down to the version
numbers. Fedora doesn't provide this, for any package, including the kernel.
The kernel's module/driver INTERNAL interface changes regularly, sometimes
for no good reason it seems.
This is an upstream kernel development problem, not a Fedora one.
I too get quite aggravated by this. No, just because I choose to run a few
proprietary modules in the kernel (in my case, it's all vmware stuff) does
not mean at all that I shouldn't run Linux, or even Fedora, for that matter.
Perhaps I'm not even running VMware for the reasons you think I am?
FOSS and proprietary software are not and will not be mutually exclusive,
despite some folks misplaced idealism.
--
Lamar Owen
Chief Information Officer
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC 28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu