On Wed, 2006-03-22 at 02:23, Arjan van de Ven wrote: > > But has anyone at RH tried asking for permission? Including preset repo > > lines for livna is right out, both legally and morally for the mission > > of Fedora. But what about the idea of a legal but non-free catagory for > > Flash, Acrobat, Nvidia, ATI, etc? > > what makes you think NVidia and ATI are legal? Ok, I'll bite. It's legal until they they get busted. Since that isn't going to happen, it's legal. If anyone started a legal fight over it the BEST case scenario is they rework their code a bit and push most of it into userland at the cost of performance. All of the other scenarios are very bad. Since everyone involved knows this is reality and most are somewhat rational there won't be a fight. To get a fight started somebody has to believe they have something to gain and there would only be losers in a GPL enforcement action against Nvidia or ATI. I think the word you are looking for is moral and that gets a little fuzzy but not much. In the end everyone knows the situation is sub optimal for everyone but until someone can propose a solution it is what we have to live with. You can't negotiate with the 3D vendors because they aren't able to state their position openly. It is clear they are terrified about something regarding opening their code or specs but without knowing what we are left guessing. (Is it fear of Microsoft? Fear of patent lawsuits if it became known how many they are violating? Fear of customers seeing just how crappy their stuff really is? Fear that most of the value is in the driver instead of the hardware, thus if the knowledge embedded in the drivers were freely available the Chinese could knock off some competitive hardware designs? The possibilities are legion.) However with all the major forces in the Open Source world quickly aligning for a hellbent push to a 3D desktop to compete with Aero Glass, moral considerations are going to be paved over by expediency. It won't be the first time. Remember when many otherwise 'pure' distributions shipped Netscape because it was the only viable browser? Which brings me back to my original question. If we accept that some chunks of closed software are going to remain in most user's machines for the foreseeable future, how can the process of obtaining these pieces be simplified. If Debian can accept the existance of a non-free repository, is it a winning position to be more hardline than "we are more RMS pure than even RMS himself" Debian? So if making it easier to obtain certain non-free components is thinkable the questions remaining are: 1. Which unfree components is it acceptable to point to. This isn't a slam dunk either way. Especially since things like mp3 support that are illegal in the US are perfectly legal in most of the rest of the world. It is probably going to end up being a legal requirement to leave it out since Fedora is too closely tied to RH to escape the ravages of the trial lawyers, but if you are arguing that legal be damned, we must do the moral thing then how can imposing bad US laws on the rest of the world be justified? Just my $0.02 but I'd argue that Flash needs to be in until the free replacement works for most users. Acrobat can probably be told to piss off now because xpdf, at least for me, already opens more documents than acroread. The Nvidia driver will probably be there forever but if the Free ATI driver ever gets to the point it works for most users it should be pushed instead. Java support for browsers via gcj is almost ready to kick Sun to the curb but not today. Firmware blobs (like the Intel wifi cards) should be so long as the vendor is OK with it. 2. How large a barrier is needed to make explicit that unsupported software is on the other side, in the case of driver software that makes most of the machine unsupportable. Would it be enough to put the repo files for these components in extras with no dependencies, so a user would have to explicitly install them? Should their installation trigger a dialog with a EULA style warning they must click off on? Or perhaps include them in the default list of repos set to disabled with comments explaining the situation? -- John M. http://www.beau.org/~jmorris This post is 100% M$Free! Geekcode 3.1:GCS C+++ UL++++$ P++ L+++ W++ w--- Y++ b++ 5+++ R tv- e* r -- fedora-test-list mailing list fedora-test-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-test-list