Hi Hans, before you decide to leave, I think you should filter the lists of replies so you only see what Nicolas Mailhot has said. He sums up what Fedora is and how a distribution by and for open-source developers can be enhanced for end-users with cool reasoning. As to the rest of the arguments, it really boils down to this: there are many end users of Fedora products. Some want to try the latest and greatest without having to roll their own distribution, others want to run a commodity operating system that is free, and still others have been talked into it because they're timesharing the computer with someone else that's more gung-ho about open source. These are all audiences of Fedora but none of them are the target audience. Fedora is a project whose goal is to make a product: The very best open source operating system that money can't buy. Since it is the "very best" naturally everyone is a potential satisfied user of the OS. However, we have never defined (or limited) our distribution by the users we are trying to satisfy, rather we are striving to create something that exemplifies the state of the art in open source. Something that (since we contribute our changes into the upstream projects) pushes the state of the art one step beyond where it was before. Inherent in defining Fedora as an "open source operating system" is the idea of evolutionary growth. Unlike other software methodologies (Commercial games come to mind where you buy Warcraft, Warcraft II, and Warcraft the Last Battle[Before the Sequel]) open source sees products grow and change in capability and character over time. Evolutionary growth requires two things: coding and usage (analogous to mutation and survival of the fittest). When a change such as the Xorg release comes up, someone has already done most of the coding. We can do some more if there are out of tree open source drivers that need updating. Then we have to release it into the distribution so it can be run over by tons of users who can enjoy the new drivers and find bugs that need to be ironed out. Releasing Xorg for FC5 is philosophically and technically important to Fedora because it helps to improve the _quality_ of _open-source_. Does it hurt end-user's perception of open-source and Fedora? Read on. For end-users committed to or satisfied by the open source solutions, evolutionary change means a gradual ramping up of capabilities. Xorg supported my video card only through VESA when FC5 released. I have an accelerated 2D driver now and hope to have accelerated 3D once 7.1 hits the shelves. All this progress without having to change distros (including Core releases) or break my system! For people in like situations, the perception of open source is of gathering momentum and the fruiting of its potential. For end-users who need to run proprietary software, the road can be harder. Some pieces of software continue to run through upgrade after upgrade with no changes. Those programs which require a kernel module or X.org driver have a rougher time as they have to access the internal ABI of these in order to function. An upgrade that changes something internally can cause these modules to fail and there's nothing we can do about it -- only the owner of the proprietary code can fix the issue. A good vendor must adopt the methodology of the upstream project they're targetting. ATI, Nvidia, and others follow the development of Windows in order to make sure their drivers run when the next version of Windows comes out. Until they follow the development of X.org in the same fashion, accepting and anticipating the inevitability of X.org upgrades, they are going to leave users dangling when a distro upgrades. Is all lost? If you still want to run Fedora Core on machines where you have to run proprietary drivers so you can stay with familiar tools, keep contributing to a project that respects your work (and for at least some of us, your thoughts as well), and have a choice of running the latest and greatest open source on some machines and somewhat more stable code on others, I think you should consider running something that has been moved into maintenence mode. Fedora Legacy works to maintain the security of its releases without upgrading for features. If you keep the machines where this is an issue on a Fedora Legacy release that just trails the non-maintenance Fedora Core releases you can still get new software on ~6 month intervals (rather than the glacial pace of Debian stable) while enjoying a much more stable platform for running proprietary drivers. If this works well, you can start a project to inform end-users of this three tiered approach: Rawhide to develop the OS. The latest Fedora Core for those who want to run the latest software on a stable operating system, and slightly older Fedora Cores maintained by Fedora Legacy for those who just want things to continue working with occasional security enhancements. -Toshio
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