The Multimedia Question

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 7/18/07, Max Spevack <mspevack at redhat.com> wrote:
> What follows:
>
> 4) To what extent is it appropriate for hooks or other "stuff that makes
> it easier for someone to do non-free stuff like CodecBuddy" to exist in
> Fedora?  We need to decide on this from a philosophical standpoint.

I've absolutely no problem philosophical with making it reasonably
easy for end-user to choose legal proprietary optional software,
post-install.  We already sort of do this for content through the
rhythmbox to magnatunes et al. End users can choose to buy content
that cannot be distributed as part of Fedora because its non-Free (in
magnatune's case Non-Commercial CC)

There is one primary caveat however.  We need to be reasonable sure
that making such choices more accessible does not come back to unduly
burden Fedora developers and contributors via bug reports and other
misplaced support requests that can't be dealt with.  For music
content, the probability of this is inherently low. For functional
code, like a codec plugin we need to have some technical means in
place to ensure support requests don't get shovelled to Fedora's
bugtracker and just pile up.   If we are going to integrate something
like CodecBuddy and points people to an external source, do we also
have a means to shuffle bugs and feature tickets into their hands as
well? And can we get a commitment from 3rd party sources to be good
citizens and actually deal with the bug reports?

The secondary caveat is... we will also need to be reasonably sure
that we are not creating exclusive partnerships.  For whatever
mechanisms we expose to users, there needs to be clear and public
rules for inclusion and exclusion of 3rd party sources that are
listed.  We may decide for example, that exclusion may happen when a
specific competing technology implementation becomes available in the
mainline Fedora repositories which makes the 3rd party offering
essentially duplicative.

> 6) Acknowledge that just because something is illegal in the US, it
> isn't illegal everywhere in the world.  Help people use Fedora, remix
> Fedora, and redistribute Fedora, in ways that are Legal for them and
> acceptable to Red Hat as the legal entity that controls Fedora.

revisor and the open build system take this pretty far from a
technical nuts and bolts point of view.  But the harder question is
how can we integrate these derivative works into the larger Fedora
community in a way that lets everyone know that such efforts are
welcomed and encouraged.  How can we use the Fedora brand in a way
that makes the Fedora project tent bigger so that we don't have to
point to "them" but instead other people can point to "us"
collectively so we can all benefit from the community building
perception created from the additional volunteer work.

-jef