On encouraging Macromedia & others to supply repos for Fedora

[Warren Togami]

David Nielsen wrote:
> 
> I was mainly complaining about his choice of announcement channel, using
> his status and the Fedora projects official announcement lists does give
> people like yourself the idea to ask questions like:
> 
> "Will we be making more deals like this" when the Fedora project clear
> has no such deal nor can it due to it's pure FLOSS guidelines.
> 
> Warren should know better, as should you for that matter, you clearly
> understand that there's a reason for the stance we take, thus please
> don't assume that we have in the past or will in the future compromise
> that stance to provide officially supported repos of proprietary
> software.

I somewhat agree that it was a mistake to use fedora-announce-list to 
point people at the Flash repo.  More importantly, I failed to make it 
clear that the 3rd party repository is clearly not a part of the Fedora 
Project.  Note that fedora-announce-list historically has allowed other 
3rd party repositories (containing far more evil GPL violating 
proprietary kernel modules) to announce their existence.  Perhaps we 
should be disallowing non-Fedora Project announcements entirely in order 
to make things simpler.

In any case, later announcements of the (too frequent) security updates 
that went to non-announce lists made it explicitly clear that the repo 
was not part of Fedora.

The original agreement was between *ME* and Macromedia sometime during 
2002, prior to the founding of the original Fedora Extras project.  I 
was annoyed that Macromedia only distributed the clumsy tarball binary. 
  So I convinced them that I could make it more convenient for users to 
install and update the plugin.

At the time they were uninterested in maintaining their own RPM.  But 
today they are interested.  Sometime after the release of Flash 9 Adobe 
will be taking over RPM packaging and publishing of their own yum 
repository.  I will be happy when I am no longer involved in 
distributing their proprietary software.  But meanwhile I think it would 
be an unnecessary inconvenience to users to simply stop doing it before 
Adobe responsibly takes over.

Warren's Evilness Ratings
=========================
3/10  Adobe Flash Player
9/10  NVIDIA or ATI Drivers
10/10 BSG Season 2 DVD's sold in two parts =(

 From an evilness perspective, I don't consider their proprietary plugin 
to be anywhere near the evilness level of NVidia or ATI binary-only 
drivers.  I think proprietary software has a right to exist.  FOSS 
should also have the right to compete with it on a fair playing-field.

Unfortunately the playing field is not fair... but at least Adobe isn't 
blatantly violating any copyrights and the GPL.

Warren Togami
wtogami at redhat.com