A few weeks ago I did a post about apt-get and security, and how autopackage affects all that.
One point I made is that distros should not be able to control what software users install, because they are inevitably biased in their selections. No distro today is a shining tower of justice and equal opportunity – every one of them discriminates. Sometimes that’s because of ideology (Debian) or lack of manpower, and for distros funded by corporations it can be due to a ton of factors, most of which are invisible.
I used Mono and Fedora as an example of how this discrimination can be opaque and unaccountable, and got slammed in the comments by some people who felt Red Hats explanation of “legal reasons” was good enough, and how dare I suggest it was because Red Hat were aggressively funding GCJ/Classpath/Eclipse. It was said:
This is a poor example because this is in fact a legal issue. Whether you understand the legal issues involved in a detailed way to make such a claim is a different thing. Very few people do but to suggest that this is somehow non legal is a misleading claim
… and …
If you ever learned anything about legal issues it is that you dont explain everything in minute detail because everybody who wants to try and poke holes will do that anyway and nitpick.
Yet today, Chris Blizzard posts to his blog the following:
We’ve been the longest holdout in shipping mono. This was for a variety of reasons; Some were business-related and others were strategic in nature but those don’t really matter right now.
I don’t see the word legal in that. To me, this nicely rams home the point that controlled repositories are divisive and that even generally awesome corporations like Red Hat will end up abusing them.
Epilogue – I should note that I love Red Hat, and I think they’re one of the most impressive companies around. They managed to build a successful company employing hundreds of people based on a fundamentally idealistic premise: that software should be free. They’ve always been true friends of the community, and I’ll always be grateful for what they’ve done and continue to do. I’m picking on Red Hat here because Mono is such a neat demonstration of my point, but there are plenty of other examples. Nobody should interpret this post as a “Red Hat is evil” rant, because they aren’t. And the fact that eventually they came around to the communities decision and admitted they were wrong is a wonderful demonstration of that.
