KDE RedHat project

[Steve Bergman]

Jeff Spaleta wrote:

>On 8/18/05, Thorsten Leemhuis <fedora at leemhuis.info> wrote:
>  
>
>>But if some Add-On-Repos would provide such a CD-ISO as add-on in their
>>Repo and if this CD is well known to everyone  ("hey, go and get that
>>Fedora-Add-On-CD, without it Fedora is not fully functional") it would
>>solve the problem for most people in the freeworld more easily.
>>    
>>
>
>Logic fault:
>if its well known to everyone there would be no need to point to it by
>anyone else.
>
>Semantics aside and without touching the policy issue that Sundaram
>brought up about whether its the right policy decision, no... redhat
>as the managing entity cannot willfully point people to a collection
>of software they know is infringing..even if its public knowledge by
>other means. It doesn't matter if this makes logical sense, we are
>talking about US law here.. logic does not apply.  Legal risk is legal
>risk, the entity who is liable has to evaluate the situation and
>determine where the line is as to what behavior brings unacceptable
>risk. Since redhat is the one exposed to the legal liability at the
>moment as the managing entity, its very difficult to make any
>compelling argument that second guesses their legal opinion as an
>outside layperson, simply because our assets are not on the line.
>
>-jef"is waiting for someone in the community to offer to indemnify
>redhat against all liability for contributory infringement"spaleta
>
>  
>
What I keep hearing in this thread is that RedHat's position as the 
"managing entity" of Fedora is holding Fedora back in the area of 
multimedia.

Don't get me wrong; most Fedora work gets done by people with redhat.com 
email addresses.  But it is true that RedHat represents a nice *central* 
target for a legal suit, which is just what patent holders like.  It's 
so old-school and comfortable to have some central entity, with money, 
to attack.  How might the promised Fedora Foundation change this?

Personally, I'd be happy if the installation offered the ability to add 
entries to yum.repos.d (a big hurdle for newbies) which was not limited 
to, but did include Livna, accompanied by the expected stern warnings 
about respecting your local laws.

Adding repositories is not a big deal for us old hands;  It's just a 
PITA, nothing more.  But the newbie is already overwhelmed by switching 
OSes.  To them, "Fedora just doesn't support multimedia".  All 
discussions of "feature parity" aside, when's the last time you saw an 
Ogg Theora stream on Yahoo's site?