Double dare ya, Fedora! And your art sucks!

[Benjy Grogan]

On 3/28/06, Rahul Sundaram <sundaram at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-03-28 at 09:56 -0300, Casimiro de Almeida Barreto wrote:
> > Andy Green escreveu:
> > > Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> > >
> > > (...)
> > > > But the art problem pales compared to the issue that everyone has
> > > > been
> > > > 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
> > > ...
> > > > It's 2006, people.  The Web is fifteen years old.  Even non-
> > > > techies
> > > > have had a decade to form expectations about what constitutes a
> > > > base
> > >
> > > Supporting Flash seems to soak up most of the problem that can be
> > > solved, eg, youtube, Google Video, and if you have 32-bit firefox
> > > you can have it.  Seems the only answer for Quicktime and such is
> > > the corporate mantrap that is Mplayer, it makes no sense for Redhat
> > > to invite attack on their cash by playing that game.  There is no
> > > limit to the number of dangerous proprietary formats that one could
> > > address by that logic.
> > >
> > This kind of argument only shows 2 things:
> >
> >      1. RedHat/Fedora people are absolutelly unable to deal with major
> >         manufacturers (Adobe for Instance) and have good versions of
> >         Flash/Shockwave and (Apple) Quicktime. Curious thing is that
> >         my Apple Mini (a real wonder) runs OS X Tiger (that is a *NIX
> >         system) and has no problems with flash, shockwave or PDF
> >         files... as well as don't have problems with device drivers.
> >      2. RedHat wants, in the mid-range/long term to have a "commercial
> >         product" where those "facilities" and other "utilities" are
> >         sold at a price...
>
> or 3. We actually want Fedora to be a entirely Free and open source
> system like stated explicitly. Funny how that works.

I think more official agreements like the one for Macromedia Flash
that Warren Togami somehow got would be useful.  These companies that
do provide linux versions of their software should be interested in
getting their software out to all the distributions.  I'm very happy
with the fact that all flash plugin updates will automatically be
taken care of.

Benji