Fedora and non-free
The Debian folk are now bickering over whether their non-free software archive should exist, or whether folks need to add them by themselves. Joey Hess wrote up his thoughts on why he voted against keeping non-free around.
Which got me thinking. Currently, The Fedora Project has got a set of objectives that promotes the fact that we build the system exclusively from open source software. Then you’d think of using either Fedora Extras or Alternatives right?
But even there, in the terminology it states that we use open source software. As long as we realise that after the mega-merger of all 3rd party RPM sites, sites like Dag’s and even the macromedia sites stay alive. We can preach open source software, but the other archives offering not-so-open source software, must still exist.
So clearly, since Red Hat will host Fedora Extras soon, non-free stuff will have to be in Fedora Alternatives, no?
Non-free stuff won’t be in Fedora Extras or Fedora Alternatives, but in 3rd party add-ons repositories only.
Yes, but currently the 3rd party repo’s contain what the Extras contain too…
Hey!!! Lets all go and buy a Windows XP CD from Low Yatt!! I hear its only RM5!! And they have these cool DVDs
which contain all the Windows versions plus Office XP!! YAY!!!!
Or if you want the open-source version, download it from IRC!!!
YAY!!!!!!!!
You seem to think fedora.us would be replacing my repository. But the goals are completely different. Whereas I build packages for 7 distributions (and counting), the fedora.us people only bother to build for the latest Fedora Core releases. Not Red Hat Enterprise, not from the same source and with a lot more overhead than a single man can stand anyway.
Lots of things differ and I think they will for a long time, no matter what you throw at it ;-)