On 2008-09-05, Sylvain Abélard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > For those reading this mailing list for a long time, however, and > knowing the details of the license, I don't feel like my freedoms are > hindered at all : it's LGPL with added clauses, and these clauses > merely states that one should not seek support or hold Tuomo > responsible for outdated versions nor unapproved patches. ... > > DISCLAIMER : That's just my view of things. I may recall wrongly. > I made it simple, therefore it does not show every side of the debate.
You're right. It has never been my intention to hinder the "freedoms" of users. The terms are there to limit the power of distros, which has grown far too great, with them fielding de facto central control over easily installable software. In the distro-centric FOSS climate, to upgrade the most insignificant program, you have to upgrade the whole OS, and suffer all the hurdles. And there are a lot of them, because the movement produces shit that turns Linux into more and more like Windows: no user-serviceable parts inside. Fontconfig, udev, HAL/evdev, and the XML madness in general being cases in point, not to even speak of the kernel becoming more and more bloated and uncompilable by mere users. So I rather stick to an older distro, without all the new shit that the corporate-sponsored FOSScracy of fuckwits and dickheads spews out. But that means I can't run any new programs easily either. And unlike the 5-10 year cycle of Windows, Linux distro are obsolete in one month. I could not even test Gnomefox 3 (known to some as Firefox) on Etch, which is only a year old. Gtk is apparently 0.02 versions too old. No, I won't even try compiling such bloatware. (And, no, I wouldn't use it; I only wanted to test how crappy they've made it.) More recently, I was trying to find a photo management program slightly better than gqview (which still remains the best image viewer I've come across for Linux, and suprisingly usable for WIMPshit). The digikam provided in Etch was ancient crap, but I was told newer versions would be slightly better.. off to hunting and compiling a gazillion dependencies, wasting hours only to find out that it segfaults. I wish authors would provide binary packages, like I do. But no, the herd just loves its distros, and some projects (e.g. KDE) bluntly tell you to eat the shit that the distros shove at you. Maybe it works for big projects like them, with the distros doing the final polishing, but little projects don't get even that. Shit flows upstream. Megadistros should die, and to be replaced with minimalist core systems (possibly providing a few packages customised for their audiences) and a decent system for distribution of third party packages. Maybe then basic GPL can work again, when authors are again the primary source of their own software, intead of being reduced into unpaid subcontractors for powerful distributors. Down with the distros! -- Tuomo
