Stanton-Finley Goes Ubuntu
 

Seems to me that there are a few common issues that everyone agrees on or has a pet hate for. Largely it seems that a bulk of this is third party repositories that are incompatible eg livna and rpmforge, atrpms etc.

Most need the third party repo's for the fedora system we want could we have these in a restricted-extras repos and multimedia extras so that users can install everything needed for a fully functional system.

Why is this problem never solved ? How can we solve it ? Can we help is there a project to achieve this?


Noticed in this post http://stanton-finley.net/forums/vie...9d4de8c%5B/urlStanton-Finley goes Ubuntu that stanton finley a person whose installation and setup notes helped a lot of people out including me, learn and setup fedora over previous versions has switched to ubuntu. Fedora needs to keep peple like this and others in our forums that help others and make them feel welcomed.

Red-Hat hasn't sold out to Microsoft and Fedora is up to Fedora and it users. If Fedora helps Red Hat this isn't a bad thing its a good thing, unless you like microsoft of course.

I love fedora for its stability, security and configurability. Haven't got to use FC6 yet as my PC is down, but as soon as my processor arrives in the mail you know what I will be doin hope it is as good as it sounds.

Started thinking more about this after reading this review http://www.softwareinreview.com/cms/content/view/57 and the devs response here http://kernelslacker.livejournal.com/62413.html

Fedora is doubly-constrained in what software it can include in any officially recommended repository: the project itself is committed to not using software with patent issues or non-free licensing, and Red Hat are also legally responsible for the actions of Fedora. As a publically traded US company RH have to be very careful.

I have a lot of sympathy with Dave Jones, but I think that his comments are slightly unfair. Fedora is not a supported commercial distribution, and can afford to take a strong line since it is not answerable to customers. Red Hat uses and supports non-free code with it's Enterprise products out of necessity. Ubuntu is also a supported commercial product, and must make the same kinds of compromise that Red Hat does with RHEL.

I'd also add that Fedora's status also limits the situations where it can be deployed, so it may be inevitable that Ubuntu becomes the de-facto standard distribution. I've spent a lot of time on Fedora and still like it a lot, so hope that it can find a niche for itself in the long-term.

I agree with him regarding the third party software repositories. My suggestion would be that Fedora Core needs to create some sort of Fedora Extras restricted packages repo (think universe and multiverse in Debian) either in an official or non official capacity and host the repo outside America. They would then need to encourage packagers from the third party repos to collaborate and maintain their packages in this repo so that package incompatibility is reduced as well as cutting down on duplication of effort.

This could be done for a subset of items, like firmware blobs and binary-only drivers. Unfortunately there isn't a way to encourage third-parties to use a specific repository without Fedora (and RH) potentially carrying some legal responsibility for the packages. IIRC, the legal position WRT patented stuff like MP3 would potentially be "contributory infringement".

The legal advice for patent encumbered stuff used to be that the most that Fedora could do was generically state that third-party repositories existed, but not mention them by name or link to them.

I really see no problem with the way fedora is structured. That is, not providing any proprietary software. Those running fedora soon find out about livna or freshrpms.net as sources for the restricted packages. The problem is on the part of many users who somehow expect linux to be windows, no thinking required attitude. Well, sorry that's not the way linux works. Its a community project supported by the itself. Fedora doesn't need to do anything, that's the users job.

... and that's what's keeping Linux in the backwaters.

Better free in the backwaters than bound to proprietary software

Sure setting up the repo's and then doing --enablerepo and disablerepo with yum isn't hard. I just don't see why the third party repo's have to have compataibility issues and duplicate workloads, more could be done with less effort greater efficiency and compatability and peace of mind on the users behalf.

Proprietary drivers aside, these repo's also provide other applications (eg Myth TV, AMSN etc) some in duplicationa and others singularly.

Surely doing less work for greater result is positive.