Fedora's way forward

[Alan Cox]

On Tue, Mar 28, 2006 at 04:50:52AM -0500, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> ducking, which is Fedora's support for DVDs and proprietary audio and
> video and web-streaming formats and Java applets. That is to say, its
> crummy-to-nonexistent-to-actually-toxic support.  The tools in FC5
> weren't better than they were in FC3/FC4; after installing the
> critical bits from livna, they were *worse*. Totem tossed its cookies
> with a cryptic pop-up error; xine white-screened under one card and
> actually crashed my X under another!

You need to discuss that with Livna, except for the X crash which goes in
bugzilla. Red Hat is unable to assist you with Livna material or even give
the URL to livna in the USSA. 

> understandable if the Fraunhofer patents blocked decoders, but
> Fraunhofer itself has only dunned for royalties on *encoders* -- thus
> Red Hat/Fedora has ceded to Fraunhofer rights it has never claimed.  

I suggest you consult lawyers. Frauenhofer have claimed player royalties
and quite actively.

> If solving the multimedia problem takes having Red Hat sell a
> plugins-and-drivers disk for each spin of FC, full of proprietary crap
> that it negotiated rights for, that sucks -- but better that than
> never getting any traction on the desktop because we got too caught up
> in our own idealism to meet actual consumer needs.

Fedora is specifically a free software project. If you wish to create
a project based on Fedora that is full of proprietary products then
providing you follow the licenses and laws you are free to do so, thats
the beauty of free software. Hell if you want to buy a GPL license for MP3
for the community go ahead, I wish you luck.

If you'd like additional proprietary third party material such as real player 
and IBM Java nobody is stopping you.

Alan