[Ambassadors] The lack of quality video drivers is destroying Fedora.

[Paul Stauffer]

On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 04:34:17PM -0300, Avi Alkalay wrote:
> Also, the nVidia and ATI drivers at Livna are the open source ones -- not
> the original, more feature rich, more powerful, 3D capable, binary ones. I

No.  They are still the proprietary drivers.  Redistribution is not the
issue with them; their license is the problem.  Fedora won't distribute them
because they are not available under an open source license.  And because
their licenses are incompatible with the GPL, they violate the Linux kernel
license, and therefore Fedora *cannot* redistribute them.

> What I think Livna (or other repo) could do is what the JPackage project
> does for a long time: provide nosrc.rpm packages.
> These are only the source RPM without the license-problematic stuff. From

This is off-topic for a Fedora mailing list.  If you want to debate what
Livna should be doing, take it to Livna.  Fedora has no relationship with
nor responsibility for Livna or any other 3rd party repository.

> Altought I understand the political and religious guidelines of the Fedora
> project, I still believe this is a huge problem that should be discussed
> and fixed somehow. So in this point, I don't agree with Paul Stauffer in
> his previous e-mail.

You are right that it is a huge problem.  You are wrong if you think this is
simply a political/religious problem; it is a LEGAL problem.  And you are
wrong if you think that discussing this (AGAIN!) is the solution.  The
problem and the solutions are already well known by everyone involved:
change the manufacturers or change the law.  There is nothing else we can
do.  Repeating this discussion every other month is a waste of everyone's
time.

Again, I recommend that you read this:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ForbiddenItems

If anything on there is unclear, please feel free to ask for a more detailed
explanation.

- Paul

-- 
Paul Stauffer <paulds at bu.edu>
Manager of Research Computing
Computer Science Department
Boston University