[rant] Re: vmware and udev

[Sean]

On Mon, November 22, 2004 4:42 pm, Denis Leroy said:

> So my question was: shouldn't Fedora stand in the middle ? Shouldn't
> it be the job of putting together a desktop-oriented distribution
> precisely to coordinate the efforts of the various "forces" out there
> (a hard and thankless job IMO), and reach compromises in order to
> provide the best possible desktop experience. This has nothing to do
> with kernel development, but rather in picking the right features to
> use in that kernel without breaking the most popular components,
> coordinating schedules and releases with said components, to make sure
> a Fedora Core release doesn't break the Nvidia drivers (one of those
> most popular components, whether you like it or not) or doesn't happen
> one week before Firefox 1.0 is released. Isn't there somebody in the
> Fedora community (whether he/she's a RedHat employee or not) that

Is Fedora supposed to be "desktop-oriented", should its developers be
worried about working with closed-source "forces"?  Here's what an Fedora
webpage says, 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."  [nb. **excessive** emphasis added]

If there are enough people worried about one or more binary blobs, then an
independent support-community should be easy to organize which wouldn't
need assistance from those who are completely uninterested in such
efforts.

> should be working on this ? His/her job would include calling Nvidia
> and saying something like this "Hi, i work on the Fedora distro. Even
> though our kernel developers hate you, half of our users use your
> drivers and we'd rather not break it for our next release. Is there
> anything we can do?". To which there is or isn't of course, but at
> least somebody's gotta try...

If you volunteer your services, it would be an interesting experiment. 
Changes are usually telegraphed far enough in advance (through rawhide,
etc) that it shouldn't be a big surprise when issues arise.

Sean