Antonio Olivares wrote:
>
So you like it because it's not quite impossible to
do what you want?
Yes, it is not impossible. Just leave the default
Fedora stuff alone, put the stuff you need elsewhere
and you are good to go. Fedora does not prohibit us
from compiling from source and installing our own
programs.
But it's not really the best platform for this since it changes so
quickly and makes you repeat much of your own work frequently.
Now if you want to use third party rpms for
the programs that you need, that is another matter,
that is between you, the third party packagers and the
fedora team. This I cannot say much because I try not
to depend too much on third party packagers.
And likewise, their choice to change interfaces rapidly makes it
difficult to take advantage of other people's work.
I commend the third party packagers because they work
hard to make the *non-free stuff* work on Fedora. The
programs work nicely, but then updates come about and
the program might not work as it did and bugs appear
and it takes time for the mirrors to sync and us users
complain that a certain program is not working. We
want everything right here right now, and we simply
cannot have that. It is not a matter of Fedora being
the bad guy, Life is like that in general.
Interfaces and standards are what makes cooperation possible. Whether
you think they are bad guys or not will depend on how seriously you take
the proposition that interfaces are contracts among programmers. I take
it very seriously because every change hurts everyone else, and
everything that is not backwards-compatible or standards-compliant will
cost other people time and trouble. I think that is a bad thing. Other
people have a different opinion and think everything an upstream
developer writes should be published even if it is buggy, badly
designed, not compatible with what they did last week and breaks all of
the work others had been trying to do to build on it. I can respect the
long view of that opinion in that new ideas and code have to be tested
somewhere, but I do what I have to to avoid being hurt by it personally.
If some software is illegal, what will the big
guys do
to a little guy? Will they sue me because I have
nonfree stuff?
If they had any sense, they would arrange simple
ways for you to get
legal, licensed copies.
They tried to do that with Fluendo/Codec Buddy, but in
many ways it sucks! The third party packagers *put
their name here* make programs work in combination
with the fedora programs and everything works as it is
supposed to.
Agreed - the sensible approach would be to design a strictly-standard
interface around all patented code so you could get a licensed copy for
yourself or a specific device once, ever, and continue to use it
regardless of OS or application changes. But with any GPL'd code
involved there is no way to design such a thing and no business model to
support it. Proprietary OS's and applications can simply roll the cost
of the license into the cost of the overall product.
And the OS would go out of
its way to make sure
that the one such copy you obtain continues to run
for at least the life
of your machine. With Java, getting the copy is
matter of accepting the
form as you download from the Sun site - getting
fedora to recognize
that you have a JVM installed for the packages that
need one is a whole
different matter.
The legal staff is the one that recommends that Fedora
do this to avoid potential lawsuits and to restrict
certain stuff from happening.
The jpackage nosrc rpm approach had no legal issues.
Java is coming along
very well, in Fedora 8 there was iced tea,
Standards compliance is a yes or no question. Almost doesn't count.
in the
upcoming Fedora 9, there will be an adaptation to the
OpenJDK/ whatever it is called and it is working for
me very well. Of course some of the stuff that Sun
puts in there does not get there because of little
technicalities, but otherwise the product works and
many users appreciate that.
Do you expect this to be backwards compatible with what they have
published previously? That is, will the almost-java code that has been
written to work around the non-compliant version that fedora has shipped
for years run transparently on a compliant JVM? If it doesn't, how is
the fedora near-java different from the one Microsoft tried to ship from
the perspective of an end user who doesn't want to be locked into a
platform?
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
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