Linked by Robert Trembath on Wed 18th Feb 2004 01:29 UTC
Couldn't stop myself from trying the new Fedora 2-test1 release, even if it is an alpha! The 2.6 kernel, KDE 3.2 and Gnome 2.5 all in the same release was just to much candy to turn away from; too bad it's more sour rather than sweet at this (beta) point than I would have expected.
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the proprietary drivers from ati and nvidia will not ever
be part of fedora core. Fedora Core is completely open-source.
That means you will never see nvidia proprietary drivers
you will not see sun's binary only java implementation
you will not see macromedia's flash plugin
in fedora core.....not unless they open source these things.
Please if you are going to comment on the absent of these sorts of things from the distro...please make sure you take the time to comment on the fact that Fedora Core's objectives is to create a COMPLETELY open source operating system. Whether you value that as the primary objective of Fedora Core or not, is another debate...but its worth debating. It is important for everyone to understand that Fedora Core is going to be completely open source (and only include open source software Red Hat can legally distribute inside the United States without running afoul of the DMCA or software patents).
If you read the fedora.redhat.com
website, and list of objectives in the about section.
http://fedora.redhat.com/about/objectives.html
you will see that Fedora Core makes being open source the #2 objective...if you are going to ask for proprietary pieces of technology be included, please inform the readers about the fedora objectives, so each person can evaulate for themselves if the effort to create a complete open source solution is worth the extra hassle.
Forget for just a minute that things like Sun's java and Macromedia's flash plugin have licenses that do not allow for redistribution by 3rd parties....and as far as anyone can tell Java and Macromedia really aren't interested in giving permission to the Fedora Core community repackage things to be mirrored widely. Warren Togami, has somehow convinced Macromedia to allow him to repackage and distribute the flash plugin, but you and I and everyone else are not allow to mirror the packages, becuase Macromedia will not allow that...not without special permission.
http://macromedia.mplug.org/ :
"Macromedia's EULA forbids repackaging and/or redistribution of their software so please do not mirror this repository. Please point your apt-get or urpmi to one of these official
mirrors of this site, as they will be permanent."
And let's be honest about what the extra hassle actually means. It means going to some place like rpm.livna.org or macromedia.mplug.org or freshrpms.net and downloading the proprietary add-ons that you want AFTER a base install. Is that really too much to ask? Is it really too much to ask considering that Fedora Core is an attempting to create a completely open source general purpose operating system?
Let me answer that for you...no. No it's not too much hassle...if you value open source, beyond its 'free as in beer' aspect.
And FYI, completely open source implementation of java is not that far away....gcc cvs is a strange magical land.
http://sources.redhat.com/rhug/
http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/gcjwebplugin/