Re: RH and GNOME
Luis Francisco Gonzalez <luisgh@cogs.susx.ac.uk> wrote:
> The problem with say imlib is that he refuses to change the major
> number even though the libraries are incompatible because it looks
> ugly... We could ignore this but that would make RH and Debian have
> different libraries numbers and we don't want that.
imlib is small enough that we could provide both imlib and preimlib
in the same package. [and we could increment the major number on
preimlib as often as we like, and use that for the debian instances
of the software.]
> Personally, I have am also very worried to see how more and more RH is
> taking control of major parts of Linux. Even if it is just visibility
> (which BTW I think it's not the only problem) they seem to _be_ GNOME.
Are you saying that GNOME is no longer a GNU project? If not, why
worry?
> We used to house the CVS repository and we have committed money but
> are now clearly unimportant. CVS is now housed by RH and the main
> developers are working for them.
If we don't get credit for this, I suppose you might want to be
upset about this, but Red Hat is doing a lot more right now than
we are. [In principle, we have some resources that Red Hat can't
bring to bear, but those are mostly testing resources.]
I'm not really upset about this because Debian is very slow at doing
development. When Debian was first formed, the idea was that we would
do *no* development, that we would exclusively work to package up
free software written by other people. We've had to abandon that
with dpkg and apt, but that's a whole different thread.
> Of course I understand the reasons that would personally make all
> those people join RedHat as they get paid to do what they like. I
> guess I even envy them. But the issue is that development decisions
> are going to be taken by people working for one vendor and it's this
> vendor that will determine what the priorities are. I sure hope
> harmony gets usuable.
So far, Red Hat as been pretty consistent about licensing everything
with GNU's GPL. Considering some of the recent discussions here, they
might even be more solidly in support of GNU's GPL than we are.
Personally, I'd like to see us working more closely with Red Hat.
But to do that, we'd need to come up with a package management system
that could work with packages from either system. At the moment that
would mean dpkg being able to install both deb and rpm, transparently
(getting this to work would be easy compared to the prerequisite of
understanding dpkg as a whole and addressing its bugs and inefficiencies).
Of course, maybe Bruce will solve this by trumping both of us.
The strength of Linux is that we're a free software community.
That means the competition is non-free software, not free software.
Red Hat is on our side, I believe. So is Cygnus. So is FSF.
For that matter, even non-free outfits (Corel, Caldera, Sun, Microsoft,
etc.) can be on our side, though obviously some are much more helpful
than others. [But that's another rather involved thread.]
I think we should make a deliberate effort to adopt their standards.
And, when their standards are inadequate, get them to adopt ours, or
at least document the issues (yes, the whole package management issue
is hard, so that's just a "todo", not something that we have to
do right now).
I think it's great when we have people working in more than one Free
Software organization. We need more of that.
I don't see Red Hat as a threat.
--
Raul
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