Well, I've tried GNOME 3 now...

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Mon, Apr 25, 2011 at 5:23 PM, Bill Nottingham <notting at redhat.com> wrote:
> http://git.gnome.org/
> http://spins.fedoraproject.org/
>
> The beautiful thing about open source is that you always have that choice.
> Sure, you may not like the amount of effort that may be involved (on a
> scale that goes from switching your local desktop, all the way up to forking
> your own copy of GNOME 2.30 and taking it in whatever direction you feel
> like), but it doesn't mean you don't have that choice.

Even if there were no "open source" you'd have the _choice_ of creating your
own operating system and software all from scratch if the available software
didn't work the way you needed it to.  But because of the enormous effort
required that "freedom" isn't very meaningful.

Likewise, when the whole  distribution is driven  in a particular direction
going against that direction is quite costly: Even if you're willing to put
in the effort to support and maintain gnome 2.30 you will still suffer from
the fact that Fedora is developed against and tested with the new stuff and
will almost certainly become gratuitously incompatible with the old stuff.

People use distributiosn because assembling and maintaining the whole system
on their own is not a good (or available) option for them.  Fedora's support
for non-standard configurations is not especially good, even compared to
some other distributions.

The difference  from the above no-open-source example is only  quantitative.
Meaningfully so, but "you can break free from the fedora  default and engage
in an unsupported  high effort  configuration" is still not a valid argument
against claims that a decision is net-detrimental to the Fedora user
community, even if it is technically true.

That sort of argument  should be rebutted with evidence that on the whole
and in the long term the change is expected  to be beneficial to the user
community and/or the GNU/Linux  ecosystem overall and evidence that these
goals could not otherwise be met through means which deprived (by forcing
them into non-standard configurations) fewer users of the value that
Fedora provides.