[Fedora-packaging] supporting closed source operating systems? (was: Early MinGW packaging guidelines draft)

Daniel P. Berrange berrange at redhat.com
Thu Jul 10 10:40:04 UTC 2008


On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 12:57:57AM +0300, Axel Thimm wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 08, 2008 at 04:58:20PM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> >   https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackagingDrafts/MinGW
> 
> What is Fedora's motivation is promoting using Open Source on a closed
> source operating system? This is beyond the FPC to decide as this is a
> technical committee, but still a valid question and maybe one that the
> board should be investigating.
> 
> F/LOSS often had and has to compromise on its base principles to get a
> lift-off, and so does Fedora (the current exception for firmwares is
> such a compromise). Before there was a Linux kernel, the GNU project
> was "supporting" closed source Unices and by design still does so.
> 
> But we're beyond the age of this kind of symbiosis, Linux (or
> GNU/Linux ...) and Fedora in particular doesn't need this anymore. In
> fact when a patch in a Fedora package is made it often doesn't matter
> if it works on other Unices, sometimes not even for the Free ones.

<rhetorical>
If we're beyond the age of symbiosis, we can remove SAMBA from Fedora
then, because that's only needed for interoperability with closed
source products.
</rhetorical>

I'd love to believe that Fedora and F/LOSS had achieved world domination
but sadly we're still fighting the battle, though unquestionably further
along than we were just a few years ago. One of the best things about
F/LOSS is that there are soo many projects breaking down proprietry walled
gardens, but providing interoperability with closed source produts/platforms.
This is providing users an escape path, allowing them to migrate to Fedora.

SAMBA is a great example of this.  We want Fedora+libvirt to provide the
escape path for people running VMWare + Windows, and for this to work we
need to provide the libirt clients for Windows platforms. This enables
them to switch out VMWare in favour of Fedora + Xen/KVM, without having
to migrate their entire desktop environment from Windows to Linux at the
same time.

Daniel
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