Fedora Desktop future- RedHat moves

[Les Mikesell]

Francis Earl wrote:

>> It is redistributable or Ubuntu couldn't have it either.  And it could 
>> be trivial to add even if it wasn't included.  It isn't.
> 
> Sun and Ubuntu agreed that to distribute it, the user would be presented
> with terms to agree on. Red Hat decided this was unacceptable. Red Hat
> is one of the leading reasons Sun opened Java as they employ many of the
> Classpath guys - and it was nearly a feature complete replacement for
> Sun's Java.
> 
> If Red Hat had caved like Ubuntu did, Sun never would have opened Java,
> they were firmly against it for something like 8 years (see IBM's open
> letter on the topic.

You say that as though you think IBM or Red Hat can teach Sun something 
about giving away code.  Sun being the largest single open source 
contributor... (3x IBM, 5x RH, 
http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/ict/policy/doc/2006-11-20-flossimpact.pdf, 
pg. 51 - and that was before opensolaris, zfs, or the jdk).  Perhaps you 
imagine the tail is wagging the dog here.

Or that you think letting anyone modify the code will improve it in some 
reasonable amount of time.  I expect to see a repeat of the GPL flavors 
of NFS that took about a decade to become usable.  If other people could 
do better than Sun with the code we'd have had an open version that 
works already.


>> A matter of opinion and speculation so far - or just plain FUD... I'd 
>> like to see this shaken out so if it really is illegal to use Linux with 
>> software of your choice everyone can just move on.
> 
> No, it is neither opinion nor speculation.

Until someone proves that device driver code is derived from one of the 
OS's it can be used with and is not fair use of an interface it is all 
speculation.

 > Nvidia gets away with it
> because they do not distribute the driver as part of the kernel. The
> kernel developers are looking for ways to ensure this is harder in the
> future so that people don't jump through such loopholes.

I really have to wonder why even a small percent of OS users choose 
something that goes out of its way to make things harder for them.

 > I doubt they
> would do that though until there are open source alternatives that are
> good enough. It would simply effect too many users.

Wait - did you say someone cares about users?

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com