Vendor only distributable packages - was " Kernel 2059 from Dave Jones fixes nvidia.ko loading"

[John Morris]

On Tue, 2006-03-21 at 09:03, Arjan van de Ven wrote:

> in some jurisdictions there is a legal precedent for linking to
> "illegal" content to be just as bad as distributing it. Now I'm not
> saying that the flash plugin is illegal (it's not afaik) but the
> parallel is enough to scare many lawyers ;)

I really doubt there could be legal implications to pointing to an ftp
site.  Even if they prefer people go to the webpage there has been
enough cases now about linking to pretty much settle that issue.

But has anyone at RH tried asking for permission?  Including preset repo
lines for livna is right out, both legally and morally for the mission
of Fedora.  But what about the idea of a legal but non-free catagory for
Flash, Acrobat, Nvidia, ATI, etc?  Surely Fedora isn't more RMS pure
than Debian, is it? If it can pass political muster it shouldn't be too
hard to get permission from some/all of them to allow pointing to their
site.  After all, it is a simple question of whether an extra ad
impression here and there balances out making their package far more
available on Fedora.

Of course the packages offered by all of the above tend to be horrid so
the question becomes would any/all of them either agree to host working
packages or allow linking to others who would fix and offer them up.

-- 
John M.      http://www.beau.org/~jmorris     This post is 100% M$Free!
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