Draft Product Description for Fedora Workstation

[Simo Sorce]

On Mon, 2013-11-04 at 18:19 +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Chris Murphy wrote:
> > Right, because that's a model for success that shouldn't be either
> > emulated or improved upon, it's better for each little fiefdom's paradise
> > to erect walls to ensure cross influence isn't happening.
> 
> Your insulting the Free Software community as a "fiefdom" really offends me.

Well Kevin, I normally agree with a lot of what you say, but if
"fiefdom" offends you, your pretense to decide for the users *really*
offends me.

I will not cite every passage here, but you keep complaining that
allowing a different distribution model somehow implicitly will cast
doom on Free Software.

First of all that is plain nonsense, the distribution model has nothing
to do with licenses and a Free software App store is no more proprietary
than a distribution specific repository, which in our case is exactly
the default "Fedora App Store" if you want.

But what I find terrible is that you want to make technical decisions
that *limit* users freedom, and this is *inexcusable*.

One of the most important things about freedom is to let the user be
*free*. Yes, to the point he can entrap himself. Our duty as Free
Software developers is to provide Free Software alternatives, not to
make life difficult for our users to try to force them in our own world
view, that's what totalitarianism is about.

Users will choose anyway, so the only thing you attain when trying to
put bars around a user is to have the users go away. Nobody likes cages
not even if they are made of Free Software bars.

> Hugely disruptive to your freedom, indeed… What's wrong with GIMP?

Yeah and what's wrong with the *actual* Freedom to choose what to use ?

We are not talking about distributing proprietary apps in fedora or
making them better than Free Software apps, so stop being stubborn and
look at the reality of things. Users want a better experience, and
upstreams are often in a position to do so, we just need to provide them
with the tools to do it w/o compromising the platform in the process.

A system that allows a user to install sandboxed[*] applications is
better than what we have now for some cases, and I see no reason why you
should be so upset about allowing a technical solution to a problem
users have whether you like what they are going to do with it or not.

Simo.



* and *ideally* I mean SELinux sanbdboxed with specific APIs that must
be used to interact with the rest of the system, so that the application
doesn't have free reign over users files.

-- 
Simo Sorce * Red Hat, Inc * New York