[Ambassadors] Educational spin ; The lack of quality video drivers is destroying Fedora.

[Paul Stauffer]

On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 11:18:11PM +0700, Satyajit Ranjeev wrote:
> why don't we create an add on disk or something like that so normal
> users can download this too and install the codecs and drivers etc. Now
> i do realize it has to be unofficial but hows the idea?

Sigh.

Once again, this is off-topic for any Fedora list.  Please go talk to the
Livna people or some other 3rd party if you want to do something like this.

And again: It would be a VIOLATION OF US PATENT LAW for the Fedora Project
to distribute many of the multimedia codecs you refer to, and it would be a
VIOLATION OF THE GPL, and therefore a VIOLATION OF US COPYRIGHT LAW for the
Fedora Project to distribute non-GPL-compliant kernel modules such as the
video drivers you refer to.  Does everyone understand this?  Would it help
if I used more capital letters?  The fact is we are LEGALLY FORBIDDEN to do
what you are asking.  So everyone, PLEASE stop asking.

If you live in the free world where software patents are not valid, then you
are absolutely free to make your own repo or disk or whatever that contains
all the open source codecs that you want, just like Livna does.  But
*Fedora* can't do it unless US law changes.  Period, end of story.

- Paul

-- 
Paul Stauffer <paulds at bu.edu>
Manager of Research Computing
Computer Science Department
Boston University