to autodownload or not to autodownload

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, Rahul Sundaram <sundaram at fedoraproject.org> said:
> Chris Adams wrote:
> >Once upon a time, Brian Pepple <bpepple at fedoraproject.org> said:
> >>On Sat, 2008-02-09 at 10:19 -0600, Chris Adams wrote:
> >>>The free Flash players, as distributed in Fedora, will _always_ be
> >>>broken, as they can't include MP3 for audio (at least until about 2017).
> >>>If it allowable for codecbuddy to point to a gratis MP3 codec, why is it
> >>>not allowable for something to point to a gratis Flash player,
> >>>especially when it is the "standard" and the company behind it actually
> >>>sets up a repo for use with Fedora (as opposed to the MP3 situation)?
> >>The source code is available for the mp3 gstreamer plugin.  The only
> >>reason we can't include it in Fedora is due to US patent law.
> >>Proprietary flash on the other hand is closed-sourced.
> >
> >Does codecbuddy point to the open source MP3 plugin or a proprietary MP3
> >plugin?
> 
> We can't link to the open source version due to patent laws. I guess we 
> need to have this conversation every few weeks.

That was a rhetorical question.  Fedora has codecbuddy that points to a
proprietary MP3 plugin.  Picking on Flash (where a company is providing
a Fedora-compatible repo for their software) seems wrong when Fedora
includes software that points at other proprietary software.  Fedora
can't provide fully-functional Flash, so why can Flash not be like MP3
and have Fedora point at the Adobe repo?

-- 
Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.