David Nielsen wrote:
I was mainly complaining about his choice of announcement channel, using
his status and the Fedora projects official announcement lists does give
people like yourself the idea to ask questions like:
"Will we be making more deals like this" when the Fedora project clear
has no such deal nor can it due to it's pure FLOSS guidelines.
Warren should know better, as should you for that matter, you clearly
understand that there's a reason for the stance we take, thus please
don't assume that we have in the past or will in the future compromise
that stance to provide officially supported repos of proprietary
software.
I somewhat agree that it was a mistake to use fedora-announce-list to
point people at the Flash repo. More importantly, I failed to make it
clear that the 3rd party repository is clearly not a part of the Fedora
Project. Note that fedora-announce-list historically has allowed other
3rd party repositories (containing far more evil GPL violating
proprietary kernel modules) to announce their existence. Perhaps we
should be disallowing non-Fedora Project announcements entirely in order
to make things simpler.
In any case, later announcements of the (too frequent) security updates
that went to non-announce lists made it explicitly clear that the repo
was not part of Fedora.
The original agreement was between *ME* and Macromedia sometime during
2002, prior to the founding of the original Fedora Extras project. I
was annoyed that Macromedia only distributed the clumsy tarball binary.
So I convinced them that I could make it more convenient for users to
install and update the plugin.
At the time they were uninterested in maintaining their own RPM. But
today they are interested. Sometime after the release of Flash 9 Adobe
will be taking over RPM packaging and publishing of their own yum
repository. I will be happy when I am no longer involved in
distributing their proprietary software. But meanwhile I think it would
be an unnecessary inconvenience to users to simply stop doing it before
Adobe responsibly takes over.
Warren's Evilness Ratings
=========================
3/10 Adobe Flash Player
9/10 NVIDIA or ATI Drivers
10/10 BSG Season 2 DVD's sold in two parts =(
From an evilness perspective, I don't consider their proprietary plugin
to be anywhere near the evilness level of NVidia or ATI binary-only
drivers. I think proprietary software has a right to exist. FOSS
should also have the right to compete with it on a fair playing-field.
Unfortunately the playing field is not fair... but at least Adobe isn't
blatantly violating any copyrights and the GPL.
Warren Togami
wtogami@xxxxxxxxxx
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