Stallman And Bero Interviewed

Juraj Bednar writes: "I have done two interviews: one with Bero from RedHat and one with Richard Stallman, the GNU and FSF founder. I usually write in my native language, but since these interviews were done in English, I asked myself why not to share them" Readers may want to also visit Bero's shared-source.com, and bookmark it as a FUD antidote.

Comments

Re:don't forget the other interview!

[bero-rh]

First of all, this is not some generic interview section - it's just a pointer to some questions about "shared source" I answered a while ago.

But since I'm reading this, guess there's no reason not to reply. ;)

1) Ever since the Qt license problems have been resolved, RH hasn't had problems with KDE. Actually, most people in this office use KDE.
There have been a couple of internal flamewars of course, but nobody really takes them seriously.

2) Sure - some of the most serious gripes I've had with Red Hat Linux when I started BeroLinux have been fixed for quite a while - for example, the lack of a possibility to add a non-root user during installation (added in 6.1), KDE integration (initially added in 6.0, updated to a sane version in 7.1), or wasting space by not compressing man/info pages (fixed in 6.1 or 6.2, don't remember), or the lack of optimizations (all 7.x releases are compiled with -march=i386 -mcpu=i686). There are still some things I'd do differently, but overall, I'm quite satisfied with the current version (the current beta in particular).

3) Yes, to an extent. It annoys me even more that RH never bothered to make an official statement regardning the compiler.
I think the whole thing wouldn't be the way it is if someone in power had taken the time to communicate it correctly, preferrably before the 7.0 release.

4) That strongly depends on what you want to do - I personally want to eliminate the need for non-free OSes, which means usability (and thereby KDE) needs the most attention at the moment. But then, things like scaling down to embedded devices and up to high-end servers are not exactly useless either... I think going ahead in all directions the way it's happening now is a good thing.

5) We have a more generic approach to prelinking (needs a patched ld.so and binutils though). This is part of the current beta of RHL.

They did give a challenge - two years ago.

[DeeKayWon]

Right here.