The Multimedia Question

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Jul 18, 2007, Max Spevack <mspevack at redhat.com> wrote:

> 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. The lawyers will help us with the legal standpoint.

How about keeping this information not in CodecBuddy itself, but
rather in xml pages in Fedora servers, but in such a way that users
can easily reconfigure their CodecBuddies to pull the information from
other locations as well.  Then, the community that's not encumbered by
US law can create information that the Fedora project itself can't
recommend.

Then, we could ship it with a default configuration that points at
information that only explains why we can't include support for such
and such formats, but that provides information about how to configure
CodecBuddy to use an alternate source of CodecBuddy information that
makes it easy to install the non-Free stuff, and perhaps inform the
user that alternate sources of information for CodecBuddy may be
available elsewhere, but that Fedora itself cannot recommend them or
the software they might suggest.

This will then make for a one-step education for users, after which
they can make a decision as to whether to use this alternate
configuration that recommends non-Free Software, or look for
alternate CodecBuddy configuration files in the internet.


Since CodecBuddy would be used by users as means to obtain information
and software that can decode formats they don't have software to
decode, having it obtain information from the internet before
obtaining the software per se wouldn't be a major issue.

That said, we could include the educational-only message in the
CodecBuddy package itself, and use file:// URLs to make them available
even when disconnected from the internet.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
FSF Latin America Board Member         http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}