> Benefit can be a bit hard to pin down, if nobody had done anything about > saying no to proprietary, there would be none of the benefits from FOSS. > Without open-only systems we might not have ended up with the great > open video driver stuff from Intel, for example, that I am enjoying on > this laptop. Canonical are going in the opposite direction, bundling > ATI and nVidia binary drivers on the next version, I read, that is > really going to validate and perpetuate the binary-only situation there > and is that really a benefit in the end? Probably not. But also, I suspect it isn't the real issue. Personally, I have always thought comparisons between linux distros rather pointless. Ubuntu is always going to be easier on newbies to linux than Fedora given its approach to non OSS stuff. A newbie installing Ubuntu is probably going to have an easier ride, and thus stuck with linux, than someone trying out Fedora. This is not a bad thing. If someone trying out Ubuntu realises that linux is a good desktop solution that that can only be positive. One more Ubuntu user might not be more more Fedora user but is one less windoz user :) Similarly, if such a user whilst learning about linux through ubuntu learns about Fedora and what they stand for, and decides to to support that all the better. A lot of the technology ubuntu uses (such as udev, selinux), was first tried out in fedora. This is a good thing. cheers Chris
