Jeroen van Meeuwen wrote:
Restrictively patented software may, in your and many others' opinion, still be Free; I my opinion, it's not. It may be FOSS, but it isn't Free in the most pure sense of the word; If I can't share what I use, freely, with someone else just because there so happens to be an ocean in between and my buddy is living in the states; that to me isn't free.
But surprisingly, nobody makes any effort to share the burden of system administration, which is why so few people use unix-like systems and why there are endless discussions like this of what packages should and shouldn't be installed or bundled in some small set of configuration choices that aren't going to fit everyone or be exactly right for any purpose.
What we really need is a push-button way for anyone who thinks they have built a system that is well configured for some particular use to publish his installed package list - and perhaps add a repository in the odd case that he needed something not in the usual repositories. Then anyone else should be able to read through the descriptions of the purposes for these configurations and why the admin that created them believes his setup is the best, pick one, and automatically get the same set of packages installed on his own computer - and periodically repeat to track the updates. This would eliminate about 90% of the reasons for having multiple distributions with confusing differences and give the effect of having an expert system administrator tuning each installation for its intended use.
If free software distribution was really about sharing instead of providing a complex base to sell support and services, I think something like this would have been done long ago.
-- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
