On Sep 21, 2008, "Stephen John Smoogen" <smooge@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > you expect them to follow you without question. I'm not sure what leads you to this conclusion. I can see reasons to support the other claims, but not for this one. I'm quite open to questioning (too open and too willing to answer, I guess you'd all agree), and I'd be more than happy (too happy, indeed :-) to answer questions as to my motivations, goals and positions. What I seem to be facing is the exact opposite situation: (some) people in charge are unhappy for being questioned on a decision that, to me, doesn't make sense. > unlike a good prophet you expect them to do the work for you. Make > an Orange Sombrero or some hat from Brazil. Show that it can be done > and maintained.. and then you will have something to point to. Erhm... I've *already* done the work, at least the part that others hadn't done before, and I've already pointed at them a number of times. I've also offered to linux-libre packages for Fedora? In fact, that was the first thing I did when linux-libre came up. And I've been doing that ever since, although under the name freed-ora, because Fedora proper rejected it. You can see more info about the project and maintenance at http://fsfla.org/selibre/linux-libre/freed-ora As for actual distros, gNewSense and BLAG use linux-libre, and they have since before I joined it. Now there are more. Besides, BLAG happens to be based on Fedora, as you probably know, so there's little point in creating yet another distro just to prove this point. And then, this would do little to liberate Fedora users. You see, it doesn't make much sense to try that elsewhere, given that the goal is to improve Fedora. I'm very surprised this meets so much resistence. Even if my way of presenting the suggestions causes strong antagonistic reactions, one would think the stated goals of the project would eventually prevail and dominate the feelings the things I write seem to evoke. But they don't, and I can't quite understand why. I can understand "we don't want a kernel-libre variant, we're just now finally getting rid of the kernel-xen maintained separately, and it still hurts". I can understand "we don't want people's computers to stop working because the non-Free firmware is gone", even though I don't quite agree with this stance. But I have no evidence that people who object to this move even looked at the list of affected modules before raising the objection. And then, although back when this started a few oddball components would indeed miss the firmwares, and be disabled from the build because of that (which wouldn't stop people from building the modules on their own), nowadays both kernel.org and linux-libre's kernel sources let you ship the firmware separately, and the modules will pick it up. I can understand "we don't want to have more maintenance work because of this issue", but this shouldn't be an issue when someone offers to do the maintenance work for you. I can understand "we don't want to diverge from upstream", but tracking a slightly cleaned-up version that tracks upstream very closely isn't quite diverging. I can understand "we're concerned the project might just disappear and then we'd be left out in the cold", but linux-libre tracks upstream so closely as to be interchangeable, and the changes required to adopt it (or to drop it) are no-brainers. I can understand "we're not in a hurry, and upstream is taking care of it for us", but there's no indication that upstream will follow through or even is trying to address the same problem, and meanwhile there is a solution that we could adopt right now, even if temporarily, so this position comes off as "we don't care enough about this". I could understand if someone wrote "you attack us and disturb us, why should we take your suggestions or your package?", but I'd hope Fedora's decisions would at least try to separate the messenger from the message. I could understand if someone wrote "given your background and political agenda, if it's you maintaining this package, then it must be too radical for us", but given the considerations above, I'd consider this foolish. I could understand if someone wrote "look, we just don't want to do this, shut the fsck up and go away", but the "don't want to" is a consequence of the actual reasons, which are precisely what I'm trying to understand. What is it that I'm missing to understand the rejection of a Free kernel for Fedora 10? -- Alexandre Oliva http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/ Free Software Evangelist oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org} FSFLA Board Member ¡Sé Libre! => http://www.fsfla.org/ Red Hat Compiler Engineer aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org} -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
