On Wed, 2004-05-12 at 08:23 -0400, Chalonec Roger wrote: > 1. Why is fedora free and why would people work on it for free? In general you used to have the following freedoms with software: 0) run the program for any purpose 1) study the program and adapt it as needed 2) distribute copies 3) publish modified versions However, more and more software was limiting these freedoms with copyright licenses containing outrageous statements, like assuming you're a potential criminal and that copying is wrong. So in 1984 Richard Stallman starts what in a few months became the Free Software Foundation, promoting the creation of software where those 4 freedoms are upheld. They begun the GNU project. The project for a fully free operating system. For the definition of Free Software read: http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/free-sw.html They were largely successful, but they where still very dependent of the proprietary UNIX machines that existed until... In the early nineties, Linus Torvalds and friends start writing a kernel for the i386 aiming to have an unix-like operating system. Well, there already was an almost complete UNIX like operating system: The GNU system. The alliance the Linux, the kernel, with the GNU system created what is known as the GNU/Linux operating system, which is a totally Free (as in freedom) operating system. The GNU/Linux system is frequently called just Linux, and some operating system philosophies believe the os is only the part that interacts with the hardware and manages process execution, but I don't think that is where it ends. > 2. Some people are concerned that since Fedora is open source that they > don't know where the software comes from so they can't trust it. How > can they trust it? Well, they don't know where any software comes from unless they study the source code, do they? They can give a certain amount of trust to the guys that are selling them copies, but not to the software per se, can they? With Free Software... look and behold... you have the freedom to study the code and adapt it to your needs. This includes checking for backdoors created by malicious programmers, extending the feature set of a certain program in order to increase your profit, etc... etc... Are you free to do that with non-Free Software? > 3. How are updates to Fedora vetted and accepted? The updates are generally tested by the community, but ultimately it all falls down o Red Hat. > 4. Does Redhat have any involvement with Fedora? Some say more than it should... But I'll not comment on that right now. > 5. Does Redhat use the > same processes in "controlling" fedora quality and releases as it did > the free versions of Redhat? I think not, since they are interested in touting the advantages of their Enterprise line. > 6. Ostensibly Redhat offered free versions > of Redhat Linux because they could make a profit on support. Now Redhat > has built a market and Redhat is no longer free. What is the profit > motivation of the Fedora group and persons/orgs who make software > contributions to it? (By the way, there is nothing wrong with profit.) Just as there is nothing wrong in profit, there is nothing wrong in expecting no profit. Why should there be a profit motivation? Is money all you desire of life, for instance? Rui
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