Re: In Linux, "freedom" means you have no freedom but to bow to Stallman.
Well, you've got this straw man back to front then, because even Fedora have now relented and allowed these non-free packages in. And they were always very clear what they meant in this context: things that they were not legally allowed to redistribute as source.
Personally, as a Linux user, I'm not particularly concerned what 'market' share the Linux desktop has, so long as it's large enough to be sustainable. I realise the people who make the distros may sometimes wish it was bigger, but as a tool I use I'd prefer it if they didn't make changes to chase after people whose main requirement is the simplest push-button way of loading Word possible at the cost of functionality I need.
I sort of appreciated Fedora's stance on non-free, it came from RedHat, and meant they tried to provide a completely open source, unencumbered, system from the ground up. I did always enable the rpmfusion repos on my personal systems too, particularly as I live in an area where some of the things that were not re-distributable under US law were fine, but the focus of the project is the point. For most of the past two decades if you were using mp3 on a Linux system in the USA you were probably infringing the patents, that's not the fault of the Linux crowd. RedHat's response to that promoted codecs like Vorbis and Theora, they didn't entirely succeed, but they did drive the technology forwards, so WebM is still with us.
Lastly, every machine in this office that runs linux (the majority) has an nvidia card, as does my home box.
Edit: if I have any particular worry about this development it's that it might sideline the great work that RPMFusion do. I haven't been following fedora-dev properly for a while, but I'd hope if they're going down this road that RPMFusion may eventually be included in the list of things you can turn on. That'll probably never happen though, because there are real legal issues there, and distros that include some of those things are either based elsewhere or take a 'see no evil' approach to legality.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
