Corporate pressure

[Peter Backlund]

Hi.

On the subject of distributing free-as-in-beer proprietary software, I 
think that the approach Warren has taken towards Macromedia (and that I 
tried on Real and Adobe) could be successful. However, if the project 
were to be represented by someone more knowledgeable and more 
experienced in PR relations etc, we might get a few more (positive) 
answers. Two names come immediately into mind: ESR and Alan Cox.

What we want, is of course to have certain pieces of software such as 
RealPlayer/HelixPlayer and Acrobat Reader are made available in a 
sensibly packaged way, accesible via the standard software management 
tools. The community could handle this through the usual 
fedora.us/livna.org QA process, and come up with packages that fit into 
FC the way they should (menu entries, mime types, stripped bloat, 
plugins that work, etc etc). This will increase the number of satisfied 
users of both FC and the Real/Adobe products, to _zero cost_ for the 
companies in question. So, a few possible scenarios would be:

1. Company X allows free redistribution, similar to the Nvidia driver.
2. X allows limited redistribution, but through yum/apt/up2date,  like 
Macromedia does.
3. X does not allow redistribution, but can host the community developed 
package on their own site.

I think it's worth a shot at least. So, any big name takers? ESR? Alan? 
someone at redhat.com?

/Peter