legal issues (was: Fedora Review)

[Jeremy Hogan]

On 7/25/05, Thilo Pfennig <tp at alternativ.net> wrote:
> Ok, but where do we stop?

RH has to stop short of violating existing copyright or patent law, no
matter how they or we feel about it.

> Is Red Hat banning packages from distribution
> and content that is illegal in Russia or Italy? 

There's illegal content in Russia?  ;-)

> Would it be a good idea
> to ask the user on installation where he lives? The installer than could
> than have a different setup for different countries (another sort of
> localization). I do not like this direction, because things get split
> up. Debian also had repos they called "non-us". They had higher
> enrcyption bit sizes etc.. Did anyone consider that?

Yes, RH is a US based company, and the US is where most of the users
live. Enabling something overseas would cause forks in the code they'd
not like to maintain, and would send mixed messages to the users. And
RH did have alternate encryption for countries where it was legal --
note that "legal" and "not declared illegal" and "tolerated" are all
very different, at patent and copyright is all over the map.

But, it's not just the considerably tricky legalities, it's the principle.

The real issue is that US copyright is broken and software patents are
for suckers. So rather than allow people gray area end-arounds to
using patent of bully infringed code, we should instead advocate for
things like Ogg, Theora and FLAC. And continue to go way out of our
way to make sure that people understand the real reasons why RH can't
ship that stuff, and it's not that they can't afford the royalties on
MP3 codecs.

IMHO, since Fedora has not been declared a general purpose stable
desktop, telling folks to Google it will get them buy if they insist
on using dubious or flat out illegal code. Our target users either
understand what's going on, or are adept enough at installingpackages
to go and get the tools they need. Anyone who expects Fedora to be an
out-of-the-box Mac-mini-killing entertainment desktop will probably be
disappointed, but they'll live, and RH won;t get sued into the
bedrock.

--jeremy