Gerald Henriksen wrote:
I think you have that backwards. nvidia and ATI decide whether or not
it's worth it for them to release binary drivers targeted at any
particular distro release. The Fedora Project, whether in a core release
or rawhide, makes no pretense at "supporting" those drivers.
It is not a question of Fedora supporting binary drivers, but rather
the expectation of a user that once they install a released version of
Fedora that they can expect the system to remain "stable" until they
choose to upgrade to a newer version.
The system does remain stable. The unsupported proprietary drivers
are not part of the system. Wether they're stable or not depends
entirely on the vendor who supplies them.
Any update should not be pushed out to a release that breaks the users
system, whether it be a binary driver, binary application, or even
custom scripts that depend on a given version of a language/library
that breaks.
Binary drivers aren't part of the system.
If X.Org 7.1 is made available as an official upgrade to Fedora 5 when
the Fedora Project/Red Hat are aware that it will break systems that
are in use across companies and institutions then Fedora will lose
credibility and trust with the administrators of those systems, which
will damage the reputation of Fedora/Red Hat, as well as convince
those organizations to look into alternatives where stability within a
release is valued as it used to be with Red Hat.
That's what RHEL is for. If you want ABI guarantees, you pay money
for it, and you get just that. Please feel free to explore other free
alternatives if there are any which provide a stable ABI guarantee
for proprietary drivers. That's one of the benefits of open source -
you totally have choice, and do not have vendor lockin. No OS
distribution can be all things to all people, so it pays to explore
what's out there and find the distribution which provides support
for the things most dear to your heart.
--
Mike A. Harris * Open Source Advocate * http://mharris.ca
Proud Canadian.
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