Fedora's way forward

[Eric S. Raymond]

Mike Chambers <mike at miketc.com>:
> 1 - Fedora includes link/bookmark in the default bookmarks of whatever
> web browsers (or in the release notes or whatever) that points to
> www.some3rdpartyrepo.com site.  And the properties or name of this link
> is maybe 3rd Party Programs, but no one individual program is mentioned.
> 
> 2 - This web site can have all the .repo/apt/whatever files that link to
> all the different repos.  Or it can have it's own one little .repo/apt
> file that has all the repos already in it, or whatever.

Or it can work like livna, where you download an RPM that installs
repo files.

> 3 - This site would also already have whatever permissions it needs (if
> any at all) to link to all these sites and whatever else.
> 
> Would that satisfy most users for the time being until such time as
> patents, permissions, or whatever are done/used/can be used/whatever?

If we can set this up so the users are only two clicks away from the
proprietary codecs they need (one to get to www.some3rdpartyrepo.com,
one to start a meta-package download from there), then I think this 
would be good enough.

Fedora will need to make some minor changes to make this work really
smoothly, though.  RPM downloads indirecting to pirut is a good one.

The technology isn't the hard part.  The hard part is accepting that
100% free software dogmatism is not good enough as a guide to action,
because all dogma does is shut your brain down.  And that what
ordinary users want to do with their computers actually matters.

If we can get our brains that far along the path, the tech and the
money and the lawyers are all solvable problems.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>