Fedora Desktop future- RedHat moves

[Alan Cox]

> By the same token they shouldn't be actively making it difficult either.
> There is a balance to be struck here- both sides of this take away
> freedom from the user to choose and put in place what they want. In this
> case Fedora and non-free software are at extremes. A lot of distros are
> finding (or at least trying to) the very fine balance in between.

Fedora cannot (as a US organisation) point an end user at a repository
for free but US patent violating material. Merely providing a link is an
offence and there is caselaw to prove that (the infamous 2600 DVD case).

There is a common misconception that the US has some kind of "freedom of
speech" that means you can say or point at anything. This is not the
case. The US has freedom of _political speech_ so the right of Fedora and
Red Hat to say "this is stupid" is protected, the right to provide the
link is not.

The other distributions shipping patent encumbered decoders are generally
small, and/or non US based so not worth targetting with lawsuits or
difficult to reach anyway as they avoid trading in the US directly and
live in tax havens.

Codecbuddy is about the best we can legally do right now.

Alan