sabayon (was fc6 slip)

[Nathan England]

This is exactley why Linux is _not_ main stream and probably never will be. 
While I understand your altruistic thinking, in reality, people don't care, 
they just want it to work. I want an efficient desktop that I can manipulate 
to do what I want it to do. But it irks me when the distro makers tell me I 
can do whatever I want, but I can't listen to mp3s. That is just rediculous.

I want my desktop to react the way I want. I want to modify my programs to 
work the way I want, and I want to listen to my mp3's. I enjoy all my 
benefits of open source, but sometimes the ideology of GPL followers gets in 
the way of me actually doing anything productive.

So it is wrong to use a proprietary peice of software? Or support a company 
that makes an awesome application, because they won't give it away?
It makes no sense to me. 

I like and use Linux because of it's inherent security. Because of an 
excellent following and great user group communities where we can work 
together to solve problems, but don't force me to comply with your philosophy 
on life! Let me do what I want to do!

Craig, please don't take this as an attack on you, I don't mean that at all, 
but I want to rant about this because it really does annoy me at times. The 
distro makers care more about their personal beliefs than what people really 
want, and that's an OS that works, works well, and does what they want it to.

I enjoy the benefits of the GPL. Some of my code I have GPL'd. I will probably 
do more in the future. But not because I don't want anyone to use it for 
profit, but because I learned something from someone else's GPL'd code and I 
want to return the favor. But when I go to make some money off something, I'm 
going to use the BSD license, because GPL isn't for promoting open source or 
free software, it's purpose is to deny anyone from taking something and 
making more money than Richard Stallman.

nathan

On Tuesday 17 October 2006 23:02, you wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-10-17 at 22:19 -0700, Nathan England wrote:
> > I have played with all of them at some point or another and I try to
> > install every new version that comes out just to see what's new.
> >
> > I still run archlinux on all my stuff as it is extremely fast, has just
> > about every package I have ever wanted, is extremely fast, updates like a
> > charm and I've never had any form of update problem. And did I mention
> > it's really fast? It's faster than all the gentoo systems I've used...
> >
> > The only thing is, I haven't tried a 3D desktop yet, as I just don't see
> > the point...
> >
> > But hey, mp3's play right out of the box!
> >
> > http://www.archlinux.org/
>
> ----
> just a bit of commentary...
>
> One of the things I like about Fedora is that MP3's DON'T play right out
> of the box.
>
> Fedora (like Debian) embraces the Red Hat philosophy of not including
> binary only packages and not including packages whose license is not
> compatible with GPL license.
>
> Why is that important?
>
> Because it draws the distinction between that which is open source and
> that which isn't.
>
> While I appreciate that it's easier to simply jump on Ubuntu or
> evidently archlinux or ??? and start playing MP3 files, flash, Windows
> Media Player documents, ATI or nVidia 3d, ndiswrapper, etc., I think it
> does a disservice because it encourages usage of proprietary stuff at
> the detriment of the open source standards.
>
> I sort of like the concept of having to specifically enable alternate
> repositories and I think that consciously having to install the specific
> software is a reminder that this isn't open source - sort of like a
> fraternity initiation (thank you sir, may I have another?)
>
> Sooner or later, people have to value their commitment to open source
> standards.
>
> Craig

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