The Multimedia Question

[Bill Nottingham]

Tom spot Callaway (tcallawa at redhat.com) said: 
> > If the only legal way for a user to access their own data is via
> > software that comes with a patent license, I don't have that big of
> > an issue pointing to that along with whatever brainwashing/education/beethoven
> > we want to subject them to.
> 
> Which other proprietary apps should we link to? Acrobat opens PDFs that
> evince doesn't. What about flash? 

It is perfectly possible to fix evince to open PDFs that it can't now. It
is perfectly possible to fix your flash-clone-of-choice to display flash
documents[*]. It is *not possible* to, legally, in some areas, fix open
software to play certain media files. And this should be a big point in
our user-reeducation program. But, either you tell your users to sod off,
or you let them legally go about their business.

Bill

[*] Well, aside from the media codecs. Doh.