Corporate pressure

[Mike A. Harris]

On Tue, 3 Feb 2004, Peter Backlund wrote:

>So, someone at Red Hat should contact robla at real.com (_duncan in #helix, 
>irc.helixcommunity.org) for further investigation. Meanwhile, I'm going 
>to start working on, and submit to QA, a specfile for the package.

http://fedora.redhat.com/about

"The goal of The Fedora Project is to work with the Linux
community to build a complete, general purpose operating system
exclusively from open source software."

Therefore, shipping any proprietary or binary only software in 
Fedora Core or Fedora Extras is right out totally.

Shipping software which is open source but which enables the use
of proprietary plugins easily and is not very useful without 
those proprietary plugins, does not exactly promote "a general 
purpose operating system exclusively from open source software", 
and so that idea would completely go against the stated goals of 
the Fedora Project.

By keeping Fedora Project clear both of proprietary software
*and* of dependancies on proprietary software for useful
features, helps to grow interest and motivation in others to
design, develop, implement open source solutions, so that there
are open source alternatives tomorrow for the proprietary
software solutions that exist today that don't have 100% open 
source replacements.

I for one would oppose the inclusion of any proprietary software
into the Fedora Core or Extras, or any software (open source or
otherwise) which exists purely to enable layering of proprietary
software or plugins on top of that.

That doesn't stop people from going and downloading the stuff 
anyway if they want to use it.  Please don't try to change the 
project's mandated goals.


-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat