[Mageia-dev] Teamviewer and X86_64 build . . .

[Oliver Burger]

Am Montag, 28. November 2011, 15:10:01 schrieb Florian Hubold:
> Am 28.11.2011 14:55, schrieb Guillaume Rousse:
> > I'm more and more concerned about this whole attitude: "you guys should
> > make my own life easier, because other already do it". That's just
> > plain consumerism.
> Uhmm, converse argument would that you want to make your life
> (and also that of other distribution users) harder because you don't
> want to be that consumer-like? Doesn't sound that reasonable to me,
> and please remember, it's not always plain black vs. white decisions.
> 
> I can live without a get-teamviewer package, but just because of the facts
> that i'm able to install/troubleshoot it without help, because i know
> the tools to do this (rpm/urpmi) and doing that for a long time.
> 
> In the end the question should be: Do we want to make the distribution
> just for ourselves, just for the sake of having "our own" linux distro,
> or do we want also some other people to use it, who aren't IT
> specialists, programmers or rocket scientists?

I don't agree. I do think our main goal should be to provide a good linux 
distro with as few proprietary packages as possible.

Ok, if it is about drivers, there's not a real choice, so I do advocate 
providing the nvidia/amd drivers for the graphics cards, the partly 
proprietary drivers for some network cards (especially wlan).
This is a question of usability of the distro.

But I don't like us providing more and more nonfree applications.
It really is not that difficult to install things like flash, skype, teamviewer 
and so on.
In my eyes it would be the far better solution to provide documentation on how 
to install them then provide a lot of those "get-foo" packages.

Although "easy usability" is a good thing, people should remember they are 
working on the most complex machine they do have in their homes.
While nobody expects to be able to use a modern video recorder without reading 
the manual first, everybody expects to be able to use a far more complex 
machine like a computer without reading anyting?

I don't like to support that view, so why not tell people:
"We are an OpenSource project and our goal is to support OpenSource software. 
Now it is possible to install your precious applications, just look at this 
wiki page and you will be able to do it without a problem, but be aware, that 
is proprietary software and it would be better to find OpenSource 
alternatives."

Oliver