codec buddy pain

[seth vidal]

On Mon, 2007-11-05 at 13:37 -0600, Josh Boyer wrote:
> On Mon, 05 Nov 2007 14:21:11 -0500
> Christopher Blizzard <blizzard at 0xdeadbeef.com> wrote:
> 
> > seth vidal wrote:
> > > On Mon, 2007-11-05 at 14:04 -0500, Christopher Blizzard wrote:
> > >> seth vidal wrote:
> > >>> If that's the case then we should just give up on this quixotic goal of
> > >>> having a pure-free-software distro and start talking to companies for
> > >>> how they'd like us to provide their closed-source packages and how to
> > >>> tie a webstore frontend into yum.
> > >> yumgate!  woo!
> > >>
> > >> In all seriousness I don't think that there are a lot of instances where 
> > >> we would be willing to do something like what we've done in this case. 
> > >> I'm happy with inconsistency, as long we're transparent about it.
> > >>
> > >> In this case it's just because there's no other legal way to do it.  We 
> > >> can't even ship the free versions because of patent concerns.
> > >>
> > > 
> > > This is what I'm looking for here. I'd like to be able to say something
> > > that kinda-sorta makes sense for reasons to say no to money from some
> > > vendor to put an ad for their software in the distro.
> > 
> > Hmm.  Trying to firm up the message here.
> > 
> > For me this was all about consuming content.  The basic problem we're 
> > trying to solve for end users is that there's a lot of content on the 
> > web that requires access to patent-encumbered code.  In order to keep 
> > Fedora relevant for the real world, we felt that we needed to make an 
> > exception for end users to legally obtain codecs to view encumbered content.
> 
> Wait... what prevented users from legally obtaining codecs from fluendo
> before?  Nothing from what I remember...
> 

nothing, it was just not trivial nor contextual to trying to use those
formats.

That's what codeina has done - but it's brought something else into
relief. We have this software in the distro now that a big portion of is
providing a window for advertisements for closed-source codecs from
another company.

That's the precedent that concerns me.

-sv