Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

Posted Sep 27, 2017 4:54 UTC (Wed) by lsl (guest, #86508)
Parent article: Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

The workstation WG's shenanigans to undermine the normal Fedora community processes are almost unbelievable. This bullshit is going on for years now and the tactics are as underhanded as ever.

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Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

Posted Sep 27, 2017 14:46 UTC (Wed) by mcatanzaro (subscriber, #93033) [Link] (11 responses)

Really? We exist entirely within the normal Fedora community process. FESCo can override any decision we make if it wants to.

Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

Posted Sep 27, 2017 15:04 UTC (Wed) by mcatanzaro (subscriber, #93033) [Link] (2 responses)

Additionally:

* The Workstation WG didn't even discuss the kernel 4.13 update yet, much less make any decision. This article describes my prediction as to what could happen if it were to come up on the agenda.

* I dropped my objection to the kernel update once it was determined that affected users will still be able to boot into a graphical environment successfully, since there's a working fallback to the noveau driver. So even I now agree that the kernel update is fine.

It should really not be controversial that a mid-release update that causes users' previously-working computers to no longer boot is unacceptable under any circumstances. If an update breaks users' computers, we lose those users to Ubuntu. And nobody honestly cares what kernel version they're running, as long as their hardware works. So if a new kernel *were* to seriously break users (and this one doesn't), then it really ought to wait until the next Fedora release: just like kernel upgrades have to wait in every other distro.

P.S. I *really* wish we could say that Nvidia's crap proprietary driver was not supported, but that's just not the world we live in... not if we want the Fedora community to continue growing.

Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

Posted Sep 27, 2017 18:08 UTC (Wed) by Otus (subscriber, #67685) [Link] (1 responses)

> So if a new kernel *were* to seriously break users (and this one doesn't), then it really ought to wait until the next Fedora release: just like kernel upgrades have to wait in every other distro.

That's not a solution unless the old kernel version gets updates from the distro.

I have not tried to maintain a kernel release, but I know that having to support multiple versions of any software will require multiple times the maintenance resources. So the resources would have to be there or else you'd be trading some users being unable to boot new kernels to *all* users being vulnerable to security holes.

Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

Posted Sep 28, 2017 16:21 UTC (Thu) by mcatanzaro (subscriber, #93033) [Link]

That's true.

One could argue that the solution is to just stick to LTS kernels. But in this case, it turns out that we have a working fallback to noveau when the proprietary driver breaks, so it's fine to just keep shipping the latest kernels.

Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

Posted Sep 27, 2017 19:49 UTC (Wed) by lsl (guest, #86508) [Link] (7 responses)

Even when FESCo makes some decision, you guys tend to interpret it as applying to "Fedora" with different rules of your own choosing applying to the Workstation variant. Nothing new here, this kind of stuff already happened back then with the Gnome spin. Like when after weeks of arguments and flamewars FESCo decided that Fedora is going to ship an enabled MTA/sendmail for one more release. You didn't like that decision, so you chose to interpret it as not applying to the Gnome spin and just reverted it in the Kickstart.

Nowadays you really want to ship proprietary software. Instead of convincing the Fedora community to change its policies you come up with these "third-party repos" that are described as "supported" and feature prominently in Gnome Software. What is this other than circumvention of Fedora policy regarding the inclusion of proprietary software?

Also, the "but FESCo can always override" argument requires other people to act and bring it to FESCo. When any decisions by FESCo or other governing bodies are seen as a request to try the same bloody thing again with some inconsequential tweaks, people grow tired of constantly having to put up a fight. You're the ones wanting to change foundational aspects of Fedora, so you should be the ones required to put in the effort to convince the community that these changes are for the better. You haven't been able to do that. Yet, you proceed with the implementation of these changes.

This behaviour is highly toxic to the Fedora community and is certainly a significant ingredient to the frustration and disillusionment of many long-time contributors.

Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

Posted Sep 28, 2017 0:26 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses)

>. You didn't like that decision, so you chose to interpret it as not applying to the Gnome spin and just reverted it in the Kickstart.

That is entirely within the rights of the variants of Fedora and such changes are routinely done by them. They aren't merely a collection of packages in an image.

Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

Posted Sep 28, 2017 9:08 UTC (Thu) by lsl (guest, #86508) [Link] (1 responses)

What's the point of on elected body making decisions when they're irrelevant to the thing you get when you go to the Fedora website and click "Download"?

Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

Posted Sep 28, 2017 11:56 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

"What's the point of on elected body making decisions when they're irrelevant to the thing you get when you go to the Fedora website and click "Download"?

Fedora offers more than one thing to download and spins/editions etc follow the structure outlined by FESCo. If you believe that any particular issue is objectionable, you can file a ticket and get FESCo to review it.

The decision that was made by FESCo during that time about the MTA was just about the general default. If you want that default without any customization by the spins, you can download the generic "everything" installer (ie) the non live image. That is still available under

https://alt.fedoraproject.org/

Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

Posted Sep 28, 2017 16:16 UTC (Thu) by mcatanzaro (subscriber, #93033) [Link] (3 responses)

It's clear that you have been following Fedora politics fairly closely. But here are some things I think you missed:

* Do remember that the WGs are entirely subservient to FESCo. FESCo created the WGs and can dissolve any WG whenever it wants to. I doubt the current members would choose to do so, but they could if desired. If you really think the WG is "highly toxic to the community", then your endgame for ending us is to convince half plus one of FESCo members to agree with you.

* The decision to not include the standard comps group in the desktop spin kickstart, made after FESCo decided that sendmail should be included in standard, was actually *itself* approved by FESCo upon appeal! So please, don't accuse us of ignoring FESCo. I think this particular issue contributed to the understanding that the exact same set of defaults was just not going to work for both desktops and servers, and that creating separate products with product-specific defaults was the best way forward. The end result was that almost everyone was satisfied: nowadays Workstation ships without sendmail but Server installs it by default.

* I don't remember if the third-party repo policy was approved by FESCo or not. I thought it was approved by the Council instead (since this was a political issue rather than an engineering issue). It's true that most seats on the Council are not elected, but it operates on consensus where all members have a veto. Anyway, turns out it's not actually approved yet: https://pagure.io/Fedora-Council/tickets/issue/121. I didn't know that; and you have a point that implementation should have waited for Council approval. Anyway, you can go campaign against that if you want to. You might actually win, judging by the comments there. But please think hard about the issue first, because this is a really tricky problem: on the one hand, I hate Nvidia's crap and don't want to advertise it either; but on the other hand, I do want to grow the Fedora community. And if we don't have good support for nvidia users, that's a huge subset of users we cannot reach. :/ (The other piece of proprietary software that's desired is Google Chrome, but that one I don't really care about.)

Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

Posted Sep 28, 2017 17:21 UTC (Thu) by karkhaz (subscriber, #99844) [Link] (2 responses)

> The other piece of proprietary software that's desired is Google Chrome, but that one I don't really care about

I'm curious: why would people possibly care about wanting to install Chrome as opposed to Chromium? Surely the handful of extra features that Chrome provides are not anything that anybody cares about?

Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

Posted Sep 28, 2017 18:18 UTC (Thu) by mcatanzaro (subscriber, #93033) [Link] (1 responses)

Fedora Chromium ships without ffmpeg support, for legal reasons, so there's no way to e.g. play MP4 videos. And it's not extensible, so there's no way to e.g. install extra codec packages from third-party repos.

My understanding is there is work in progress on a legal solution for GStreamer, but Chromium doesn't use GStreamer, so there's not really any hope for it at this time.

Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

Posted Sep 29, 2017 0:00 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

>Fedora Chromium ships without ffmpeg support, for legal reasons, so there's no way to e.g. play MP4 videos. And it's not extensible, so there's no way to e.g. install extra codec packages from third-party repos.

Not entirely accurate. It is a hack but there is

https://admin.rpmfusion.org/pkgdb/package/free/chromium-l...

Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

Posted Oct 4, 2017 16:58 UTC (Wed) by sharms (guest, #57357) [Link]

I am thankful for their push towards making typical workstations usable. There are 17 million hits on Google for 'linux nvidia', instead of pretending they don't exist this helps further adoption.