codec buddy pain

[Josh Boyer]

On Mon, 05 Nov 2007 14:21:11 -0500
Christopher Blizzard <blizzard at 0xdeadbeef.com> wrote:

> seth vidal wrote:
> > On Mon, 2007-11-05 at 14:04 -0500, Christopher Blizzard wrote:
> >> seth vidal wrote:
> >>> If that's the case then we should just give up on this quixotic goal of
> >>> having a pure-free-software distro and start talking to companies for
> >>> how they'd like us to provide their closed-source packages and how to
> >>> tie a webstore frontend into yum.
> >> yumgate!  woo!
> >>
> >> In all seriousness I don't think that there are a lot of instances where 
> >> we would be willing to do something like what we've done in this case. 
> >> I'm happy with inconsistency, as long we're transparent about it.
> >>
> >> In this case it's just because there's no other legal way to do it.  We 
> >> can't even ship the free versions because of patent concerns.
> >>
> > 
> > This is what I'm looking for here. I'd like to be able to say something
> > that kinda-sorta makes sense for reasons to say no to money from some
> > vendor to put an ad for their software in the distro.
> 
> Hmm.  Trying to firm up the message here.
> 
> For me this was all about consuming content.  The basic problem we're 
> trying to solve for end users is that there's a lot of content on the 
> web that requires access to patent-encumbered code.  In order to keep 
> Fedora relevant for the real world, we felt that we needed to make an 
> exception for end users to legally obtain codecs to view encumbered content.

Wait... what prevented users from legally obtaining codecs from fluendo
before?  Nothing from what I remember...

josh