Fedora Desktop future- RedHat moves

Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
Sat Apr 26 03:33:20 UTC 2008


Les wrote:

> On Fri, 2008-04-25 at 13:45 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
>> Why should I be interested in a distribution that makes it
>> difficult for me to make my own choices about whether a license
 >> is acceptable or not? I don't have a problem with downloading
 >> my own copy of any  >> particular code from any particular
 >> place under any conditions that I find acceptable.

> But that is the problem.  The folks with proprietary want to limit your
> use to only the systems they have chosen to support, thus you can end up
> with instruments or software that you have purchased that will not run
> when the OS changes.

That's hardly unique to proprietary software.  I once relied heavily on 
CIPE as a VPN, but FC2 just dumped it with no replacement.  Yes, I could 
have kept all the broken pieces of the source code...

>  Furthermore their licenses forbid you from reverse
> engineering the code to figure out how to make it work some where else,
> and the owner of the proprietary OS won't let you do any reverse
> engineering legally to figure out how to interface to the software or
> hardware he/she/it chooses to no longer support.

I'm perfectly willing to take the chance that if I need something there 
will be a proprietary vendor.  Aside from it being a silly argument 
particularly when we are starting from a point where the free version is 
the one that doesn't work, why is it anyone else's business?

 > Thus you are obsoleted
> with no legal recourse.

Fedora is hardly in a position to talk about obsolescence being a 
problem since they force it on everyone with every version.

> Those lovely sites where you download such
> utilities are often legally not clean to use either, depending upon the
> laws that the various entities have seen fit to pass.

Ummm, we were talking about Sun Java, here.  Remember, the one that 
defines the standard. The one you can download for free from their own 
web site. Fedora is the site that ships the non-conforming version and 
the one that is going to be obsolete.

> Finally your own
> documents, code and other encoded data may be unaccessable to you
> either, because the formatting, encoding, encryption or compression may
> be proprietary and non disclosed with the attendant no reverse
> engineering clauses, leaving you without access even to your own
> material.

Again - Sun Java. The programming language.  The thing that everyone 
other than Sun has tried to corrupt by making incompatible versions that 
suit their own agendas better.  Do you really expect fedora to ship 
utilities to fix the programs you wrote earlier under their 
non-conforming version to run under the real thing when they switch?

> That is why these licenses, and the subject of libre or free software is
> important.

Following standards is what is important and what prevents it from being 
a problem when you switch components.  The version that fedora ships is 
a non-standard one.  They aren't doing anyone any favors by making it 
difficult to use the real one.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com




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