[Bug 453422] Review Request: songbird - Mozilla based multimedia player

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https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=453422





--- Comment #65 from Stephen Lau <stevel at songbirdnest.com>  2009-06-04 19:58:25 EDT ---
(In reply to comment #64)
> In my opinion, there is a problem both with the license advertising and the
> installation of recommended plugins.
> 
> That's rather annoying for a newly created users to have all sort of
> advertising, specially if the user known well the sunbird license and/or other
> well known modules. I think that previously, the same kind of problem was
> raised with firefox which ends to have a less "interactive with end-user"
> advertise.
> (I remember some discussion on GPL not been an EULA that end-user need to
> accept/reject to use the software but a pure information).

(full disclosure: I'm a POTI employee working on Songbird - I think I said that
up above too, but worth refreshing here so it's clear)

The EULA is displayed to the user here since it's possible they might be
downloading some closed-source/binary-only add-ons.  The EULA also notes that
while the player is open source and free, the branding (Songbird icon, name,
etc.) are trademarks of POTI, Inc.  While this second part is similar to
Firefox/Mozilla and arguably could be moved to a "hat"-like notification system
like Mozilla has done with Firefox, it was still worth having the EULA
agreement for the user to protect them and give them the rights to use the
binary-only add-ons for free (since Songbird can and does license them to
partners who build their own players on top of the Songbird source)

The binary only add-ons in question are Quicktime, Windows Media, and iPod. 
The Quicktime & Windows Media add-ons are platform-specific to Windows & Mac -
so they won't be exposed to RH/Fedora users, and the iPod add-on is soon to be
open sourced... so this might be a non-issue in a matter of weeks once I'm done
open sourcing the iPod add-on.

So all that aside, POTI would feel more comfortable having the EULA window and
agreement there... it's a requirement for us on Windows/Mac due to the
proprietary binary only components, and we'd rather not get into special casing
stuff just for Linux since it's entirely possible we could deliver binary-only
components again in the future for Linux users.

(And, as always, these add-ons will always be optional... the user is free to
opt-out of not installing any of them)

> So to sum-up, I would appreciate to have less interactive information on newly
> created user (so songbird could be usable directly). But this shouldn't prevent
> this package to be approved.

cheers.. and thanks for the review!
-steve

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