Fedora Desktop future- RedHat moves

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Tue, 2008-04-22 at 22:26 -0500, Arthur Pemberton wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 6:06 PM, Patrick O'Callaghan
> <pocallaghan at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Tue, 2008-04-22 at 15:57 -0700, Francis Earl wrote:
> >  > Yes, despite it's legal ramifications... far better to risk your company
> >  > to appease users. It's not like it's not available for Fedora, but Red
> >  > Hat doesn't risk the future of the company on it.
> >  >
> >  > Google for 'Microsoft billion mp3'
> >  >
> >  > Mark is rich, but that's about 3 times his worth right there... he isn't
> >  > licensing MP3 or any other codec for his distro, Microsoft just licensed
> >  > it from the wrong people.
> >  >
> >  > Now wonder consider ffmpeg for instance has Apple codecs, mpg2/4 and
> >  > Microsoft codecs just to name a few, and ask yourself whether it's smart
> >  > to distribute this stuff.
> >  >
> >  > Only reason he gets away with it is because Ubuntu represents such a low
> >  > market share that it's not worth it today.
> >
> >  AFAIK he doesn't "distribute" it (for some meaning of "distribute"),
> >  just makes it easy to get. I may be wrong (and I've no interest in
> >  arguing about it), but I think the Fedora rationale for not doing the
> >  same thing has more to do with avoiding lockin than avoiding lawsuits.
> 
> RedHat employs lawyers. Unless the managed to employ only incompetent
> lawyers, I'm guessing they know more than you on this. So making such
> statements as "as far as you know" is useless.

The statement beginning AFAIK is with reference to Mark Shuttleworth (as
is perfectly obvious from context), and furthermore is a simple question
of fact which others have since corrected. Did I say RH had bad lawyers?
Did I say that RH took its decision with no legal basis? No and no.

Did RH take its decision for a mixture of reasons, some of which may not
be simply questions of legality? Gosh, a question without a black and
white answer.

poc