On 6/14/07, Abhay Kedia <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Thursday 14 Jun 2007 1:54:51 am Vlastimil Babka wrote:
>
> But maybe Skype is not so pressing to upgrade, just doesn't provide
> distfiles anymore. Then maybe we don't have to obey, but still it's
> really questionable if it should be marked stable at all.
>
Then don't mark it stable but dropping it from the tree altogether? That is
taking it a bit too far imho.
>
> And yeah I'm a Java dev but at least Java is now open (I admit that the
> stable VM's in tree are not, yet) and I don't see that coming for Skype.
> Also Java (and your examples of closed source stuff) are not infamous
> for the bad stuff mentioned above.
>
Has any one done the same kind of analysis on all the closed source
applications we have in tree? If we take an alternate view on the wikipedia
link then it can be said that it is just an attempt for spreading FUD while
trying to pimp Open Source alternatives?
Don't get me wrong...I love open source and that is one of the reasons why I
have been using GNU/Linux for many years but acting paranoid and dropping
popular packages from tree is not something, I as a common user, would like
to see. This is the only reason I am poking my nose in the workings of devs.
Indeed, if you were to drop all non-opensource _games_ from the tree
you'd loose most, if not all of your popular mainstream games, and
we'd have become another debian ;), and one of the big 'gotchas' i've
loathed about debian for many years is their "zomg!..its not 'free'!..
extradite it to the abyss!" , and thus for many years MP3 support and
many other applications were just the same as red hat, ... either
broken, limited functionality due to 'freeness' , or downright missing
altogether. ( anyone remember the pre-sun-java-in-debian days? )
I love free software as much as the next guy, but sometimes you want
to use something non-free, regardless of status, and regardless of how
much it sucks ;)
*ducks*
Gentoo is about choices, one of those choices is the choice to install
closed-source software, or software with well documented evils, the
best thing we can do is warn users what they're getting themselves
into and let them make an informed decision IMO.
--
Kent
ruby -e '[1, 2, 4, 7, 0, 9, 5, 8, 3, 10, 11, 6, 12, 13].each{|x|
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