Easy Fedora -- I agree with Newbie

[Peter Gordon]

On Sun, 2006-12-03 at 20:09 -0800, Leslie Satenstein wrote:
> Easy Fedora is a requirement if Fedora is to be targeting a Desktop
> user. We should point him to a place such as www.easylinux.info  where
> there is a tar  file and script (frog.sh) that installs all the
> multimedia stuff that is taboo for open source. 

As has been stated several times so far, this is absolutely NOT what we
need. Sacrificing issues of long-term freedom and security for some
short-term functionality is something that Fedora cannot do, as it is
both against its stated ideals as a distribution and also legally
questionable (aiding infringement of copyright or patent law, etc.)

> If these taboo install sources were available easily, say 30 minutes
> to install, then Fedora would be #1 in distributions for a very long
> time. Instead, it is, as the song goes, slip,sliding away.

We want Fedora to be easy to install and use, definitely; but we can
only go so far while keeping the system Free. Fedora's goal is to be
entirely Free and to do things the Right Way (in terms of security,
application integration, standards-compliance, etc.); and NOT
necessarily to be popular.

> [..]
> If there suddenly became a small charge for support (say $25.00) to
> help setup, I could see several multimillion dollar revenu [sic]
> companies coming into existance.
> 
Red Hat already is its Enterprise Linux offerings which among other
things *do* contain things like Flash, Sun Java and Acrobat Reader on a
secondary disc (though I don't know if they still do this). Or there are
free (read: "no cost", not necessarily liberally licensed) alternative
distributions which do contain this stuff as default options such as
Ubuntu, Gentoo, or others that one can choose from.
-- 
Peter Gordon (codergeek42)
GnuPG Public Key ID: 0xFFC19479 / Fingerprint:
  DD68 A414 56BD 6368 D957 9666 4268 CB7A FFC1 9479
My Blog: http://thecodergeek.com/blog/
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