[Fedora-packaging] Re: supporting closed source operating systems?

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 02:06:50AM +0300, Axel Thimm wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 09, 2008 at 11:51:51PM +0100, Richard Jones wrote:
> > On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 12:57:57AM +0300, Axel Thimm wrote:
> > > But we're beyond the age of this kind of symbiosis, Linux (or
> > > GNU/Linux ...) and Fedora in particular doesn't need this anymore.
> > 
> > The actual reality, real stuff in the real world, is that 90%+ of
> > users of desktop computer systems run Windows, another 5%+ are running
> > Mac OS X, and almost nobody (perhaps 10, 100 people in the whole
> > world?) are running a completely free operating system (inc.  BIOS
> > etc).
> 
> No one denies that, but don't we want to keep the fruits of F/LOSS to
> encourage more F/LOSS usage? Hijacking F/LOSS solutions back to closed
> source will not change the percentages above, on the contrary, you
> remove some of the good reasons to go Linux.

For what we're proposing -- libraries, not programs -- it's good to
encourage programmers on closed systems to use open libraries.

Take libvirt as an example.  There are plenty of proprietary /
encumbered competitors to libvirt which run on Windows -- eg. you can
program directly to VMWare's APIs, or XenAPI.  It's better though if
we can encourage Windows programmers to program to the libvirt API
instead of those proprietary competitors.  It's one less piece of
proprietary lock-in for those programmers, and one less thing to
unscrew when they want to port their software to Linux.

However, actually maintaining the libvirt port to Windows is currently
a huge pain in the nether regions.  It involves me having a Windows
box (not a virtual machine, mind you, because Windows really doesn't
run very well when virtualized), and because Windows doesn't adhere to
any sort of standard, I have to copy all the libvirt code by hand to
the Windows box, try to build it using a mix of tools (which have to
be installed and upgraded by hand because there's no reasonable
packaging system for Windows), then fix the libvirt code which has
usually broken (because no one ever routinely compiles it for
Windows), then hand copy the patches back to Linux, check they don't
break anything on the Linux side, and then submit them upstream.

As you can imagine, this is unpleasant, time-consuming, requires me to
use a horrible proprietary system, etc.

What we're proposing is a way to do this entirely within Fedora, so we
use Fedora packages, on a Fedora host, with a Fedora command line, and
Fedora tools.  We can do nightly autobuilds to catch problems with the
Windows port early, and automatically generate Windows packages.  No
actual use of Windows or other non-free software in sight.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat  http://et.redhat.com/~rjones
virt-p2v converts physical machines to virtual machines.  Boot with a
live CD or over the network (PXE) and turn machines into Xen guests.
http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-p2v