My 2 cents on the whole Fedora to succeed as global wide deployed desktop are...

[Martin Sourada]

On Mon, 2007-09-03 at 15:21 +0200, Jeroen van Meeuwen wrote:
> God no! If we do that, we lose. On a personal note; I'd rather make it 
> as hard as possible to ever use anything I can't read any source code 
> of, or that isn't licensed to permit me to do whatever I want to do with it.
> 
I guess he meant rather GPL software that cannot be shipped in U.S. due
to patent issues, as most of the software provided by the most widely
used third party repos (livna and fresh) is GPL. There are many examples
suggesting why this should be as easy as possible - ability to play
legally bought DVDs, ability to play mp3, DivX, H.264, ... audio/video.
Ability to install mplayer during installation, ability to install
gstreamer-plugins-{ugly,bad}... 

If we do not support this we loose. And remember, all the things I am
talking about are licenced under licences that are acceptable into
Fedora, only the damn U.S. wrongly implemented patents for software
(where they actually rather hinder progress than encourage it) prohibits
us from shipping them with Fedora. Proprietary drivers are there as
well, but that's not why we should make these repos easy accessible. 

We should encourage usage of FOSS software, but how can we do that when
we are prohibited by U.S. laws to ship FOSS software that implements
patented things? And no, I cannot play DVDs using vanilla Fedora and no,
theora isn't better than H.264 (implemented in FOSS x264 codec) and yes,
I can use ogg vorbis instead of mp3, but then my HW player will not play
them.

> Right. Europe has sanity and dignity but the US don't. Right.
There's a point in it, but nevertheless it's not true. US do sometimes
suck, but in other things the EU does as well. 

Martin
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