Fedora meeting Mono Half-Way

[Michael A. Peters]

On Sun, 2005-12-18 at 22:09 -0600, John Morris wrote:
>   For no matter how much we understand the
> trap mono represents, it is equally obvious that many people are already
> leaping into it and mono support WILL happen for certain packages.

We should avoid that at all cost imho.

I'm all for third party respositories carrying stuff with IP issues
(lame, ffmpeg, etc.) but core should never have stuff with IP issues.

Fedora needs to lead by example in that respect.

Unisys and LZW. They waited for gif to be entrenched, then "Oh btw - pay
us this insane amount or we'll sue"

OSS with IP issues should be packaged - at least for people who live
where they are not IP issues. But they shouldn't be in core.

Rather than leap into mono - truly free alternatives should be promoted
(like ogg vs mp3, png vs gif before the patent expired, etc.) as much as
possible.

For some things, there is no gray. That's my philosophy anyway. Well,
there is gray, but the gray does not belong in core - it belongs in
unsupported third party.

A flag to rebuild the rpms with mono support I think would be OK -
except that means the core developers would have to maintain it, and I
don't know how easy that would be.