Mike A. Harris wrote:
Dennis Jacobfeuerborn wrote:
[SNIP]
As long as I have the ability to do so, I pledge to do my part to make
sure proprietary software of _ANY_ kind, drivers or otherwise, does
not hold open source software users hostage or delay or restrict
open source software promulgation.
I kindof feel like staying up all night tonight now, and releasing 7.1
for FC5 on Wednesday.
So basically you say that since you cannot attack the vendors directly
you choose to do so by proxy by...
Not at all. I have no problem with the vendors. They are merely
corporations running a business, and have a responsibility to their
shareholders. Their decisions are based on what they think is best
for their shareholders. I have no fault with that.
kicking your own users in the balls?
People who purchase hardware which mandatorily requires proprietary
drivers, or whom optionally choose to use proprietary drivers for
their hardware, have kicked themselves in the balls. I have no part
in it.
You do because you know for a fact that there are a lot of people out there
running these drivers with FC5 and you know for a fact that pushing this
upgrade will break their configuration.
While I'm not exactly a friend of these vendors myself I consider this
behaviour not quite ethical.
Has nothing at all to do with ethics. The day we all stop releasing
new open source software because 3rd party proprietary software hasn't
been updated to work with it (note the incompatibility is the opposite
way around than initially characterized in this thread - it is the
hardware vendors who need to be made compatible with X, not the other
way around) - is the day the open source movement loses.
Open source software exists to free people from being trapped by
non-open source software. It exists to provide people with freedom
of choice, and not be stuck with vendor lockin.
If new versions of software are released which 3rd party drivers are
not yet compatible with, then people who use those 3rd party drivers
have every choice in the world to NOT install the update UNTIL their
hardware vendors release new drivers which are compatible.
Now your argument is getting disingenuous. None of this has anything to do
with "stop releasing new open source software because 3rd party proprietary
software hasn't been updated to work with it". You can break proprietary
software/drivers/modules each and every day in rawhide for all I care. This
is about knowingly and deliberately breaking existing user setups.
If FC5 hadn't supported the proprietary drivers in the first place then
The Fedora project does *NOT* "support" proprietary drivers at all
period, and never has. 3rd party vendors can certainly produce
proprietary drivers and make them compatible with the software which
ships in Fedora, but that is the _vendor_ making _their software_
compatible with Fedora, and choosing to support Fedora, not the other
way around.
I wouldn't see a problem here since the users had a choice of
upgrading to/installing FC5 with that fact in mind but now many of
these users will upgrade their system (which they assumed to be
reasonably "stable" because they thought an FC5 release is *not* like
rawhide) only get their X11 nuked by that upgrade.
You have the choice to configure your system to not automatically
update xorg-x11, kernel and/or other components by default if you
choose to configure it to do so.
Yet a "yum update" will not give you any advanced warning about this. Also
what happens if the next update contains a patch for a security issue? In
that case users are forced to update anyway pretty much removing the
"choice" you are talking about.
I'm all for a "we don't care about proprietary vendors" attitude in
rawhide but I don't think it's healthy to show such a lack of loyality
towards the FC release userbase.
This has nothing to do with loyalty or lack of loyalty to our users.
Fedora does not support proprietary drivers period. If you use them
and they work, that is fantastic. If they do not work, then you need
to contact your vendor for support.
Perhaps Fedora is not the right distribution for you. You might want
to try SuSE, Ubuntu, Mandrake, Gentoo, or something else. There is a
lot of choice out there.
Perhaps. But then I'm not running FC5 but rawhide without any proprietary
drivers so it's just as easy to shrug this of for me as it is for you. What
I was trying to point out is that you hurt the community you release to
more than you help it with this "fuck the world" attitude.
PS: The irony that most of the good stuff added in recent iterations of X
can only be enjoyed using the proprietary drivers by a lot of people does
not escape me and given the eventual demise of older chips (like eg
r100/r200) and the complete lack of documentation for newer chips (like the
r500 series) will only make this situation worse.
Regards,
Dennis
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