Legal Update

[Rahul Sundaram]

Tom "spot" Callaway wrote:
> 
> Like I've told several other people, it would depend on the precise way
> that it is implemented.
> 
> Draft out a specific flow of action (with the exact wording) for what
> you want to implement, and lets discuss it amongst ourselves. When we
> are in agreement that it is the sort of thing that we'd like to try to
> do, I'll run it past the lawyers, and we'll go from there.

The problem unfortunately is that, we don't seem to get past the stage 
where we want to guess whether it's legal or not and nobody wants to 
discuss what is that we want to accomplish assuming it is legal.

What I would want us to accomplish:
--------------------------------

Codeina offers a legal solution via Fluendo for those in regions that 
accept and enforce patents on software. Unfortunately this favors a 
non-free solution while there are perfectly legal (in regions which 
don't enforce patents on software which happen to be the majority of the 
world) free and open source software available via third party 
repositories for Fedora.

What I would like for us to be able to do is point to a third party 
repository (specifically the free repo of RPM Fusion) as a alternative 
source in addition to Fluendo.

We have spending nitpicking my suggestions on how to accomplish this 
rather than whether the above goal is something we agree on the whole or 
not and then figure out how best to accomplish it.

Assuming we do, what I am suggesting below is a couple of potential ways 
to get that done. Feel free to suggest better alternatives. Spot, I am 
especially interested in hearing any proposals from you considering that 
you are likely to be a better judge of what is allowed.

How To Get It Done
-------------------

Solution 1
----------

Refer http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Multimedia/Codeina to understand 
what I am talking about.

* Retain the first dialog as it is.

* In the second dialog box, above "available products", have a link 
"click here for free alternatives" which refers to a Fedora Wiki page 
that references http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/CodecBuddy and links to 
the RPM Fusion free repo release package.

Solution 2
-----------

* In the first dialog, modify it so that it says, For more information, 
refer to the Fedora Project website which links to the CodecBuddy wiki 
page.

* Drop the "see available options" button and codeina.

* In http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/CodecBuddy, refer to the Fluendo 
website as well as RPM Fusion free repo release package.


Solution 3
----------

* Retain everything else as it is.

* Just modify http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/CodecBuddy to link to the 
RPM Fusion free repo release package.


Rahul