On Monday 29 October 2007, Anders Karlsson wrote: > Thus, Les Mikesell at Mon Oct 29 22:07:52 2007 inscribed: > > I think you misunderstood. I said closed source - as opposed to Linux - > > doesn't change driver interfaces often. With Linux the kernel changes > > continuously but it is up to the distribution what is shipped. RHEL > > maintains something stable. Fedora doesn't. > > The support and the ABI/API stability is part of what you pay for with > your subscription with RHEL. You pay nothing for Fedora. Stop trying > to turn Fedora in to RHEL or CentOS, they have different purposes and > goals. What Les would like is a Fedora on a more stable (as in driver/module INTERNAL API). The discussion always seems to morph here, for some reason. CentOS/RHEL provide API stability (in general) across the entire OS, down to the version numbers. Fedora doesn't provide this, for any package, including the kernel. The kernel's module/driver INTERNAL interface changes regularly, sometimes for no good reason it seems. This is an upstream kernel development problem, not a Fedora one. I too get quite aggravated by this. No, just because I choose to run a few proprietary modules in the kernel (in my case, it's all vmware stuff) does not mean at all that I shouldn't run Linux, or even Fedora, for that matter. Perhaps I'm not even running VMware for the reasons you think I am? FOSS and proprietary software are not and will not be mutually exclusive, despite some folks misplaced idealism. -- Lamar Owen Chief Information Officer Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute 1 PARI Drive Rosman, NC 28772 (828)862-5554 www.pari.edu
