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

[Michel Catudal]

Le 28/11/2011 08:40, Michael Scherer a écrit :
> Le lundi 28 novembre 2011 à 12:09 +0100, Kamil Rytarowski a écrit :
>> I wouldn't like to follow the OpenBSD way...
> Why ?
>
> They managed to be a highly recognized system, seen as one of the best
> in his category, and was able to be developed since 1994.
>

They also have a very small user base.

>>   There is software like
>> TrueCrypt, Skype, TeamViewer that many users need. And there is no harm
>> to add it to repositories.
> I would like to remind that our focus is doing free software. And it is
> not "becoming a dumping ground for proprietary software".
>
It shouldn't be but making it impossible to install those would also be a mistake.
Skype for instance is often a requirement for many of us, not just  a wish.

I can understand the frustration at proprietary vendors but sometimes you have no choice.
For example for Nvidia the standard Linux driver sucks big time and the only good driver at this time is the one from Nvidia.

Atmel uses to be very nice to Linux users until they realized that they no longer needed Linux for the AVR32 since they moved to non OS AVR32.
I think that the biggest thing that prompted Atmel to stop supporting Linux was the constant changes in boost and glibc (to name two culprits). It seems that at each new release their avr32gdbproxy stopped working. That reminded many of the Microsoft war 
against Lotus and Borland. (A good dos is one where Lotus doesn't work). Some people's goal is to keep all proprietary software from working.
After many attempts to get their software to work again Atmel seem to have decided to abandon.
For some free software fanatics,  they must do all they can to free Linux from any proprietary software. Atmel has no interest in helping Microchip or Freescale to beat them on the market place so they cannot release certain information. This in turn 
forces us to go to windows if no Linux stuff is available.

Not to worry on the AVR32 front as I am working on an alternative for Linux. So far I got all the binaries, next step is to handle hardware debugging.
At this time I have to run Scientific Linux to get their avr32gdbproxy to work. It core dumps on Mageia. It also does on most new distribution as well.
Scientific Linux being a mix of Fedora 12 and 13 makes it possible for their fedora 12 release to work.

Following their decision to only support windows most Linux users got the shaft. It is one thing to hold some principles and an other one to  have to face reality.
We need to be reasonable and not fanatic.

Having said that I don't think that it is a good idea to have a "tainted" section, A "non free" section is good enough.

> There is several pragmatic reasons for that and, there is also some long
> term harm by shipping more and more proprietary software like :
> - we cannot support them ( no source code, most of the time, no proper
> bug report tools, anything ), with the implied consequence of "we cannot
> trust them".
>
> - it also make the distinction between application we trust and buggy
> stuff that we don't ( skype, flash ) harder to see. We can no longer say
> to people "you can trust us, everything in our repository is checked and
> supported", since this is not the case. So I personally no longer say to
> people to trust us because of that.
>
> - Most if not all proprietary softwares do not permit proper
> cooperation, which mean that we cannot plan much around it. So we cannot
> place them as proeminent features, unless we want to later risk not
> fullfilling our promises ( and I will not talk about how it goes against
> cooperation values ). This also place in a uncomfortable position since
> we are just treated as 2nd class citizen.
>
Pissing people off is not necessarily a better alternative.
Flash, nvidia and skype are a must. Making impossible to use it would result in people leaving Mageia.
It would be very stupid idea to for exemple no longer provide easy installation of the nvidia driver.
Yes I tried the free Nvidia driver, it is a piece of crap so I am stuck with the proprietary driver even though I would prefer not to.
Reality is often painfull but we have to live with it.

The proper course is to provide some proprietary driver when it is impossible to have a good free alternative.


-- 
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