Fedora Desktop future- RedHat moves

[Thomas Cameron]

On Tue, 2008-04-22 at 18:08 -0430, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-04-22 at 14:29 -0700, Francis Earl wrote:
> > The only real benefits of Ubuntu are proprietary drivers by default, and
> > easier access to patent encumbered codecs... catering to users so much
> > is why Ubuntu is so popular... no other reason.
> 
> How dare they offer something that users want :-)

Because users often want dumb things that fly in the face of Free/Open
Source Software.  Fedora has a different mandate:  real Freedom.
Ubuntu's mandate is "take the easy way, to Hell with the ethics of it."

Both have their place.  I prefer the Fedora way, personally.  

I think the Ubuntu way is also somewhat dangerous.  Some day, somewhere
someone is going to be using some proprietary driver they got from
Ubuntu at work when they get audited by the BSA or some other anti-Linux
organization, and the company is going to receive massive fines.
Microsoft is going to crow from the roof tops about how evil Linux is.

Fedora offers a very pragmatic, straightforward method for getting those
codecs *legally* through Fluendo so that you don't have to take that
risk.  

Also, Red Hat commits more to various upstream projects like the kernel,
gcc, glibc and so on than Ubuntu has ever even dreamed of.

To me, it's just smarter all the way around to use Fedora over Ubuntu.

But hey, that's just me.

As to the original topic, I don't think Red Hat has "abandoned" the
desktop market, I think that's what the media is trying to spin the
message as since that means more page views - controversy breeds
advertising revenue.  I mean, if that were truly the case then none of
the fine Red Hat engineers who have worked on, for instance, GNOME,
would be doing that work.  Wanna see Red Hat's involvement in desktop?
Look at GNOME for some clue:

rpm -qa --changelog gnome* | grep '@redhat.com'

Catch you later.

TC