Re: RH and GNOME
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On Mon, 20 Jul 1998, Kysh Dragon wrote:
>On Tue, 21 Jul 1998, Zed Pobre wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 20 Jul 1998, Kysh Dragon wrote:
>>
>> >Here's an experiment for the masses.. go to www.redhat.com and find
>> >information, within a few clicks, that RedHat is available for free
>> >download. Heck, find Linux referred to as a free operating system anywhere
>> >on the front page!
[...]
>> Click the following, starting from http://www.redhat.com
[...]
>> That's two clicks.
>
>And that's not telling you how to download and install RedHat the
>distribution, or that said distribution is free. That's like saying you
>should go to www.tucows.com to download Windows 95.
To be blunt, you didn't ask about installation instructions. You
asked to find information, within a few clicks, that RedHat is
available for free download. I think I demonstrated that.
As for how to download, if you can't figure out how to click on
the little package names in a web browser and save the resulting RPMS,
you probably shouldn't be installing Linux in the first place. Note
that although inefficient, this *is* a way to download. A brighter
user will notice that the files are stored in anonymous FTP, and if he
investigated, would notice that they are stored in a way that makes
recursive retrieval possible.
As to the fact that the distribution is free, someone else has
already posted the two-click route to that information. I feel no
need to require Redhat to put its package index in the same location
as its company philosophy.
And as to Tucows, the analogy is completely inappropriate, since
there is no "Windows 95 distribution" in the way that there are Linux
distributions.
>> Employers control what you do with their products, on their equipment,
>> on their time or in their name. They do not have any right to what you
>> do on your own time on your own equipment in your own name.
>
>The non-compete agreement I signed when I agreed to work for a large
>company in Virginia had a clause such as this -- Anything created by me
>during term of their employment was considered to be their intellectual
>property. That is not an uncommon clause.
Your choice, I suppose. I have a hard time seeing Redhat trying
to do that, though, and a job would have to offer more than double
what I normally think about to get me to agree to terms that broad. I
might agree not to work on something directly related to their
product, as a personal courtesy.
Someone wrote a little while ago that he believed that companies
might have that legal right without a contract in the US, though the
only times I've seen anything like that in my contracts it was pretty
specific, and the interviewers or representatives always assured me it
didn't apply to the stuff I wrote or researched on my own that
couldn't be seen as "stolen".
Either way, though, none of this applies to something being
developed for the GPL, unless Redhat wants to contest its rights in a
court to make GPLd software proprietary on the grounds that one of the
developers was an employee at some point. Even if they found a court
sufficiently ill-informed or crazy enough to go along with that, I
think it might create sufficient ill-will in the Linux community to
kill them dead. Nobody likes a backstabber.
The only valid point that I've seen raised applies no matter who
is an employee of whom, and that is if Redhat decides to throw a lot
of stupid-but-cute extensions on things that become so popular that
they are practically "standard", there may be a problem.
Problem for the world that buys Redhat, maybe.
I guess the problem is that I'm one of the people who never really
believed that Debian was in this for market share. Nobody mentioned
it when I became a developer. The two things that were mentioned as
important were Free Software, and quality distribution. I like those
things. And hey, market share is cool; it means that sometimes when I
walk into a new place and start work, I'll be working on Debian (heh,
I know it's late here now; I'm starting to dream), but other than that
it doesn't mean a damn to me, and if the price for my being
occassionally able to work on Debian systems is that I have to become
paranoid and distrustful of the community I work with in my leisure
time, hell, let the marketplace keep Windows. It's not worth the
personal cost to me. Let's face it: most of us only go to work the
way we do to fund our leisure time anyways. At least I hope none of
us is working involuntarily at bare subsistence level.
If the goal of Debian is a quality distribution of Free Software,
then it doesn't matter who makes what broken widgets in common use.
The calling card of Debian is that it works, it's Free Software, and
it gets the job done. As long as Debian stays that way, I'll probably
stay with Debian, and to make use of someone else's (yours?) extreme
example, I think there are people who will choose software that works
over software that looks nifty but comes up with the BSOD twice a
day.
Hell, I know people (I'm one of them) that will choose software
that works simply over software that looks nifty. Am I alone here, or
has anyone else envisioned the ritual killing of a certain paperclip?
Okay, I just reread that last sentence, and it's telling me that I
need to go to bed. I've been sick for the last two days, and writing
in here has been a good excuse to avoid dealing with the fact that I'm
consequently two days backlogged in my own work.
Can we stop the Redhat bashing now, please?
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Zed Pobre <zed@va.debian.org> | PGP key on servers, fingerprint on finger
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