The Multimedia Question

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 7/19/07, Tom spot Callaway <tcallawa at redhat.com> wrote:
> Helping Fluendo sell proprietary software is WELL outside of the
> ideology of Fedora.

Is the issue the selling or the proprietariness of it?

We already have examples of plugins that sell things (magnatunes
plugin in rhythmbox.. arguably proprietary since its NonCommercially
licensed content, depends on what shade of grey you prefer with your
cereal) and plugins which allow the installation of proprietary
software (firefox's extensions) i don't know if  there is an obvious
line that gets crossed by having a technology that makes it possible
to buy proprietary stuff at the users discretion. I'd be more
concerned about exclusivity of providing a pre-baked vendor-list.

Is there a middle ground here, where we can create an enabling
technology that users can then register new vendors against but that
we don't have to pre-populate the vendor list in the official fedora
spins?  We could easily pre-populate such a technology with our own
righteous propaganda and then perhaps clue people in on how to search
for additional vendors who know how to register against the system.

-jef