Fedora Desktop future- RedHat moves

Francis Earl lunitik at gmail.com
Wed Apr 23 06:59:59 UTC 2008


> 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.

It's funny, because if you take away OpenOffice.org/OpenSolaris they're
really done very little, and no distros actually use Sun's OpenOffice,
they use Novells (go-oo.org) because Sun stiffles development too much.

Sun is proprietary Open Source unless it suites them - see CDDL for why
this is true. Even in the case of NFS, I believe there was a BSD
alternative developing traction prior to its release.

> 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.

Umm, how do you suppose a driver work if it doesn't make calls into the
kernel? Using those functions makes it a derived work.


> 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.

They use it because they don't want to allow others to continue making
it hard for them to make their own decisions. If people knew the types
of restrictions they instill on themselves by using proprietary
software, no one would ever use it.

It is because of the vast amount of proprietary code that users are
forced to use things like Microsoft Office.

> Wait - did you say someone cares about users?

You're right, they should do it asap. It's not like there aren't open
source alternatives that are adequate. Personally I'm sick of hearing
that ATI and nVidia don't work with latest releases of software. If they
turned that over the guys developing that software, we wouldn't have to
wait.




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