The fact that the protagonist of the popular web-comic “Everybody loves Eric Raymond” has turned his back on Red Hat Fedora in an email seems to have been a major news item, according to linux.com and Heise. Unfortunately, most of these articles ignore the replies, or try to discredit them as not being pragmatic.
While it would be tempting to write an essay about pragmatic not being a synonym for short-sighted or devoid of principles, I think it is more fun to make sure you don’t miss the replies of the Fedora community. If you are into ASCII art, you might enjoy this reply by Christian Iseli:
+-------------------+ .:::/:/:. | PLEASE DO NOT | :.:::/:/:.: | FEED THE TROLLS | :=.' - - '.=: | | '=( 9 9 /)=' | Thank you, | ( (_) ) | Management | /`-vvv-' +-------------------+ / | | @@@ / /|,,,,,| | | @@@ /_// /^ \_ @x@@x@ | | |/ WW( ( ) )WW ||||/ | | | __,, /,,/__ ||/ | | | (______Y______) ///////////\////////////////////// ==================================================================
And this one by Christian Nolte is quoting ESR back at himself. But my favorite reply is clearly that of Alan Cox, who once more confirms his reputation as a straight shooter:
On Wed, Feb 21, 2007 at 03:03:50AM -0500, Eric S. Raymond wrote: > * Failure to address the problem of proprietary multimedia formats with > any attitude other than blank denial. That would be because we believe in Free Software and doing the right thing (a practice you appear to have given up on). Maybe it is time the term "open source" also did the decent thing and died out with you. > I'm not expecting Ubuntu to be perfect, but I am now certain it will > be enough better to compensate me for the fact that I need to learn > a new set of administration tools. I'm sure they will be delighted to have you Alan -- "That was said by Eric Raymond who belongs to another movement" - Richard Stallman
Fedora has been taking very important steps towards becoming a fully Free Software distribution by removing its proprietary components and ESR. This is setting an example that other distributions will hopefully follow.
