Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

Posted Sep 27, 2017 2:34 UTC (Wed) by mspevack (subscriber, #36977)
Parent article: Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

This article brought me back to August 2006, when Fedora faced a similar debate that was covered by LWN (also by Corbet).

That seeing today's article immediately made me remember an 11-year-old debate should be some measure of how difficult and controversial of an issue this was at the time, when Fedora was struggling to define its tenets, to grow a community of passionate contributors, and to attract and retain users.

I remember being very strongly of the opinion that taking an action that you know will break users is a cardinal sin, and I still feel that way. But it was not unanimous. The Fedora Board was split on the issue, and the community of most active and vocal contributors was as well. It was one of the most interesting challenges of Fedora's (then nascent) governing and decision-making structure.

Here's what LWN said 11 years ago:

The Fedora advisory board met to discuss the issue; the resulting decision was that Fedora Core 5 would not be updated to X.org 7.1. The conclusion was that the interests of Fedora users using proprietary NVidia modules outweigh the interests of other users who would benefit from this update.... distributors are acting in what they believe is the best interest of their users. Regardless of what one thinks of the outcome, it is encouraging that quite a bit of thought is clearly being put into the effects of changes on the user base.

TL;DR -- Fedora had this same argument 11 years ago and we chose not to break our users when we saw the breakage coming. Make the same choice again!

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Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

Posted Sep 27, 2017 16:27 UTC (Wed) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

Hi Max!

It isn't exactly the same issue this time

1. They can go back to the older kernel while they could not go back to the older X.
2. The system should fall back to the opensource nouveau driver if the nvidia doesn't work.
3. This breakage is going to occur all the time. That was a known risk at the time of acceptance of this feature. I think the confusion which caused the kerfluffle was that there wasn't a finished agreement on what happens when that breakage occurs. Some people thought it was that the Working Group would work out methods to help an affected user to deal with it. Others thought that it was the Working Group would have the power to stop other people from breaking their release.