Why is Fedora a multimedia disaster? - Here is why.

[Matthew Miller]

On Fri, Apr 27, 2007 at 11:04:42PM -0500, Paul Osunero wrote:
> You know, I've been wondering why Red Hat hasn't tried to pay royalty for
> media codecs.  I'm pretty sure they have enough money for it...
> Or mabye there are legal issues with including patented technology with
> Linux/GNU software?

There is a technical/legal issue with GPL'd software and additional
restrictions like a restrictive patent license. However, there's also a
conceptial one with any free software license -- how exactly is the
agreement supposed to work? What if someone takes the Red Hat Royalty-Paid
Distro and uses it to power the next iPod? How much money does Red Hat owe
when that happens? What happens if someone wants to make modifications to
the RH-shipped program? What happens if they want to distribute those
modifications?

Sure, Fedora could become a non open source distro, with proprietary
components mixed in for short-term convenience. But we've already got plenty
of those.

-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org          <http://mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>              <http://linux.bu.edu/>