Does anyone here remember when the front page of fedora.redhat.com used to read: "The Fedora Project is a Red-Hat-sponsored and community-supported open source project. It is also a proving ground for new technology that may eventually make its way into Red Hat products. It is not a supported product of Red Hat, Inc." Now the reason I ask, is that I've just finished reading this article at lwn.net (prompted by another thread): http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/203694/dab52f06fe38ff16/ The gist of the above article is that certain people at Fedora, (Red Hat?), seem to think that including SpyWare with a community distro is not only a good idea, but actually necessary to ensure the continuation of this FOSS distribution. It isn't so much the idea that the project leaders don't care about "alienating" its users, but more the implication that the degree of autonomy that the Fedora project has is little more than an illusion. The implication (from the article) is that unless the Fedora project can start providing metrics to Red Hat, then the project is in danger of losing funding, and hence be discontinued. Is *this* what a "Community Distro" is all about? As a previous package maintainer, I have put considerable effort into this distro, and to have it threatened in this way by a supposedly impartial "parent", leaves a sour taste in my mouth. I find it particularly ironic, that a distro which strives so obsessively to purge itself of anything even potentially encumbered, should be itself so heavily financially encumbered by a commercial entity. If Fedora is truly *Free*, then maybe it's about time that it proved it; by adopting a Debianesque "Software in the Public Interest" approach to financing, rather than be dictated to by what amounts to a corporate investor. So the question remains, and it's a serious one, from a serious and committed Fedora user and developer; is the Fedora Project really Free? -- K. http://slated.org - Slated, Rated & Blogged .---- | Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves. `---- Fedora Core release 5 (Bordeaux) on sky, running kernel 2.6.16-1.2133_FC5 07:29:06 up 119 days, 7:45, 3 users, load average: 3.62, 2.78, 2.49 -- K. http://slated.org - Slated, Rated & Blogged .---- | Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves. `---- Fedora Core release 5 (Bordeaux) on sky, running kernel 2.6.16-1.2133_FC5 08:22:12 up 119 days, 8:39, 3 users, load average: 2.04, 2.19, 2.25
