Response to "Getting Fedora Out of the If-Then Loop"

Jeff Spaleta jspaleta at gmail.com
Sat Feb 20 00:32:50 UTC 2010


On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 2:11 PM, Mike McGrath <mmcgrath at redhat.com> wrote:
> Without the users, the developers and other projects won't be interested
> in having their stuff on Fedora.  Neat projects like boxee, etc won't even
> consider us, again because the alternatives have the users.  This is
> especially true for the younger/in-school groups to which media is
> extremely important.  I also consider this group to be a growth market
> that we won't be in touch with.

We are in a tough position when it comes to media because its
impossible for us to provide the technology that allows for popular
media consumption without a substantial change in our guiding legal
and philosophical principles. Its sort of the same discussion I
imagine mozilla had internally over the issue of choosing to forego
native h.264 support even though that decision is undoubtedly going to
cost them users who will jump over to chrome in part to get out of the
box h.264 support.

Is there a way out of the proprietary codec trap that meets legal
muster that we can live with as a project?  I haven't seen one.

-jef


More information about the advisory-board mailing list