On Sun, August 21, 2005 3:07 pm, Steve Bergman said:
What I keep hearing in this thread is that RedHat's position as
the
"managing entity" of Fedora is holding Fedora back in the area of
multimedia.
Not really, just not embracing proprietary multimedia formats. It's a
question of priorities.
Don't get me wrong; most Fedora work gets done by people with
redhat.com
email addresses. But it is true that RedHat represents a nice *central*
target for a legal suit, which is just what patent holders like. It's
so old-school and comfortable to have some central entity, with money,
to attack. How might the promised Fedora Foundation change this?
Personally, I'd be happy if the installation offered the ability to add
entries to yum.repos.d (a big hurdle for newbies) which was not limited
to, but did include Livna, accompanied by the expected stern warnings
about respecting your local laws.
It would be good to make it easier to install yum repo entries; for
instance by just clicking on a web page link. The actual links wouldn't
have to be provided or even referenced by Fedora.
Adding repositories is not a big deal for us old hands; It's
just a
PITA, nothing more. But the newbie is already overwhelmed by switching
OSes. To them, "Fedora just doesn't support multimedia". All
discussions of "feature parity" aside, when's the last time you saw an
Ogg Theora stream on Yahoo's site?
There's a bit of a chicken and egg problem here. We need to create a
demand for free formats at the same time as creating a supply.
Cheers,
Sean