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

[Robert Fox]

On Mon, 2011-11-28 at 15:25 +0100, Oliver Burger wrote:
> 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

++1