Lately I have been getting rather annoyed with Fedora. First Codina gets turned into an impotent shadow of it’s former glory and now there is serious debate on crippling peoples hardware by removing potentially non-free bits from the kernel package (abide in a seperate package but stay with me). Now as a pro-Free Software advocate I generally support freedom, but my main problem here is that we are crippling existing setups and not once have I heard the words “work on a replacement”. The only care is the ideal of freedom and nobody seems to be interested in replacing the funtionality they rip out. This however for me has always been the tenant of Free Software, when we take something away be it the compiler, your shell or whatever, we replace it with a Free Software offering.
It seems to me that the Free Software zealots have forgotten that we need voices to speak the case for Free Software, we do this by having users. So long as we are actively making the situation better everything is fine. Red Hat e.g. has paid for the services of the wonderful John Linville who has worked hard to make Wifi better under Linux using Free Software and for years of not having this without non-free software we now have really good coverage. The same is true in many other areas, e.g. we now have upcoming good drivers for ATI and NVIDIA videocards. So long as we don’t add more non free software I think the situation is getting better the right way. Remembering that if we were to ban all non free software, such things as firmware for harddrives, BIOS firmware and other things would have to go and we have no good replacement for them yet so we’d effectively brick the machine. Naturally in due course all this should be replaced with open alternatives but none exist right now and we need voices to speak the case, we need leverage to pressure companies to open up and work with us. That is the only way we’ll get where we want to be in the long run, this hard line stance will only bring us misery.
In that vein, today I cancelled my membership of the FSF, not because I think the FSF isn’t doing important work but every person I’ve seen making the revolution argument for Free Software has included the words “Proud FSF member”, I don’t wish to be bundled in with this group and I wish the FSF would start to distance themselves from this approach. After all the GNU project started by replacing software bit by bit, I think we should go back to that wisdom.
My ideals for Free Software would be:
1) When in the market for a new functionality, always make it powered by Free Software.
2) When in the market for a new standard, always make it open.
3) Don’t cripple existing setups, what has unfortunately snuck in our platform should be a concern for replacement not removal (regressions are acceptable in this arena, once deployed functionality tends to get on par with the non-free offering fast so there is no need for a demand of 1:1 feature parity for replacement, cover the common use cases and deploy).
quaid said,
March 30, 2008 at 16:29
Agreed on replacing functionality when it’s lost due to making a decision for freedom. You are right that leverage is important, and a large userbase is a key to that; it is a fine line we walk in trying to create leverage while adhering to fundamental principals. No wonder we all stumble a bit.
There was a better direction to move with Codeina by making it possible to drop in “additional codec options”, and this is now much harder since we screwed the pooch with the upstream. Que sera sera. Still, iirc Bill Nottingham has agreed to take on the Codeina package and do the best we can with replacing functionality. The best solution would be for upstream to fix the package to not include installable codecs by default, which could then be dropped in by the user, by personal choice. As it happens, this functionality would match what was requested of Codeina/CodecBuddy originally. The default codec list was added by upstream of their own volition, which is too bad since it resulted in the current situation. (Nor did the Board’s day-late, dollar-short approach, while explicable, treat Fluendo or the package maintainer in the right way.)
Remember, with these changes to Codeina for Fedora 9, the real effect to the user is having one additional click to get to the codecs. Without Codeina, a feature requested by Fedora to resolve the ugly “no codec installed” error message from GStreamer-using applications, there was no way to educate users or point them at solutions. With Codeina, we can educate and point at solutions. All the recent Fedora Board CodecBuddy decision did was remove the ability to immediately install a non-free, patent-encumbered package from directly inside of Fedora. Now that package installation is relegated to a web shop experience, where it belongs.
davidnielsen said,
March 30, 2008 at 18:06
My main concern here is taking viable options and scrapping them in favor of nothing. I am fully on the side of the Freedom zealots when it comes to the end goal, all that stuff needs to go – but we can’t really go and break peoples setups and it seems irresponsible to remove features without having a plan to replace them. Especially since upstream will never go for this without said solution. Especially when this approach it seems removes stuff that isn’t even non-free (see Hans’ reply in the thread).
My feelings on Codina as a valuable tool are well known, I disagree with you that the approach you elected is viable or even defendable towards our users. I am there for sorry I voted as I did in the board election, I feel that the board no longer represents what I envision when I contribute to Fedora as such my general level of pleasure in contributing is at an all time low – Next time around I will be sure to ask pointed questions to the nominees to ensure this kind of user disaster doesn’t repeat itself. For now I will bow my head in shame and accept the outcome you have decided for us.