Proposal: Revision of policy surrounding 3rd party and non-free software

Tue Jan 21 18:22:22 UTC 2014

On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 01:17:00PM -0500, Jaroslav Reznik wrote:

> There are two sides of this - having our Foundations in my heart, I have to
> say no. Period. But on the other hand, we should educate our users, not hide the
> rest of world from them. What do I mean? User wants to play for example MP3s -
> our system horribly fails, PackageKit is trying to look for something that does
> not exist, fails - and this is that time it should show message like "Dear user,
> we are very sorry but... We believe in ... and so you can try to use Ogg format
> instead of MP3, take a look to services providing music under CC in this format.
> We love such music! ... more explanation ... If MP3 support is still needed,
> please approve addition of proprietary Fluendo repository. We can't have any
> liability and we can't support any 3rd party repositories of software".  

We tried that before with Codeina, and it didn't seem to end in a 
terribly satisfactory way. Instead we moved to a model where we'll offer 
an mp3 codec if the user has manually enabled a repository that provides 
an mp3 codec. What's changed to cause us to revisit that decision again?

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org