On Sun, Nov 13, 2016 at 5:12 AM, Lars Seipel <lars.seipel@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Fri, Nov 11, 2016 at 08:13:54AM -0500, Matthew Miller wrote: >> On Fri, Nov 11, 2016 at 05:06:01AM +0100, Lars Seipel wrote: >> > And there are no shady backroom deals involved that might grant rights >> > to Fedora that do not necessarily apply to Fedora's downstreams? >> >> There are no backroom deals, shady or otherwise. We don't do things >> like that. > > Thanks, Matthew. That's good to hear. >> >> > I certainly wouldn't have felt the need to ask something like this a few >> > years ago, but nowadays I guess everything is possible. >> >> Lars, I'm curious. What has happened that has made you lose trust? > > While I like Josh's interpretation of the world continuing to go insane, > there's indeed a general perception on my part that things once > considered foundational to Fedora no longer are. > > The handling of so-called "3rd party software" (proprietary software, > that is) is one thing I consider especially creepy. If last month's > proposal goes through, Fedora's package management tools will soon > advertise the installation of software that is accompanied by fierce > anti-reverse engineering terms and where the act of trying to understand > the inner workings of the software is subject to draconian DMCA-like > legislation in most parts of the world. That's a big thing and not > something you'd ever expect from the "old" Fedora. It's an experiment meant to see if it grows the user base, and in turn produces more contributors. It does seem somewhat at odds with our Foundations, but only slightly. The software was always there and always usable (and based on the limited data we had, already installed on the majority of installs). The efforts are to make it only less painful, not more acceptable at a project level. > A part of the community seems hell-bent on getting some of the > conveniences afforded by proprietary software into Fedora. That was > always the case, more or less, and is actually a good thing that can > make Fedora better. Lately though, my perception is that it became more > acceptable to take shortcuts instead of doing the hard work to arrive at > a proper solution. Rather than investing lots of work to implement solid > free hardware drivers, why not just ship the vendor driver? Packaging > software is hard, just go and dump your dev environment into a Flatpak! > A bit pointed perhaps, but I guess you know what I mean. I'm not meaning to be dismissive of your concerns at all, because I agree with them in a large part. However, what continues to happen is that people make calls for putting in hard work, but do not or cannot pitch in to do that work themselves. The project does actually have more people staffed to work on free drivers and more free software packaging, but if Fedora is going to continue to grow and succeed then efforts need to come from the entire multitude of our community. > That, together with an attitude shown on mailing lists which I don't > think is that badly mischaracterized by "if it's not Workstation, fsck > them", led me to the point where I was no longer ready to categorically > rule out the possibility that in the case of MP3 support, too, a > Workstation-specific solution might be deemed acceptable. Still > unlikely, but not totally impossible, like a few years ago. It's not Workstation specific. Your concern there is interesting though, and it might be worth continue a thread on a wider list. josh _______________________________________________ legal mailing list -- legal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to legal-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
