Haecceity

Hub claims that Fedora moving Abiword and Gnumeric from Core to Extras is sabotage. Now, either dict is lying to me, or else Hubert is confusing “sabotage” with “rationalisation”. People really need to realise that distributions deciding not to have something explicitly in their core is not sabotage, it’s not a personal attack and it’s certainly not because we want to hunt down all the authors and string them up by their toes.
Rather, distributions (unless they’re Debian, but that’s a different ballgame) must rationalise what they put into their core - there’re only so many CDs that you want to put out!
Also, realise that moving something to universe/extras/etc is not a comment on quality; it merely reflects that the distro has taken a decision based on a variety of factors and is now implementing that decision.
Yes, of course it hurts when your pride and joy doesn’t make the cut, but move on from that learn that the only responses possible are: (a) give up entirely (b) make your project so kick arse it becomes the default choice or (c) go and work on the other project to give that the benefit of your expertise. A and C are kinda similar, but with very different end results.
I personally think that this need to have reasonable defaults and not overwhelm the end user with more choices than anyone could ever plausibly want will be a very good thing.
I’ve always felt that the fact free software makes it so easy to make “just another text editor” means that all the best ideas and the talent is lost in this zoo of competing products, whilst rationalisation by distros may discourage this a little and encourage people to collaborate on making really great software.
Of course, it’s also one of free software’s greatest strengths, and I’d hate to lose that. But a healthy balance needs to be struck, and at the moment, I think we’re still too far to the proliferation of competing projects side.

np: JET - Move On