Paul Shaffer wrote:
Mike made some good points effortlessly refuted by Les in rather
> non-specific terms (more news?), essentially illustrating for the
umpteenth time, there is no viable middle ground for this discususion
> from a distro-philosophic standpoint.
Don't confuse two different rants. One, that code encumbered with GPL
restrictions can never be distributed in useful forms where you also
need the features provided by code under different terms in something
that can be considered a combined work, is mostly rhetorical since it
can't be changed - although it is something users need to understand.
The other and mostly-current rant is about usability issues that could
be fixed. All commonly needed 3rd party components could be push-button
installs; once installed they could keep working; security updates could
make it reasonable to keep running older working versions until the
worst bugs were fixed in the next update, etc., etc. This part becomes
a value judgment on the tradeoff between development time that might be
used on mechanics instead of usability and the loss of input from the
users that are forced to some other OS. This part can have a middle
ground and useful compromises.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
