Fedora's way forward

[Rahul Sundaram]

On Wed, 2006-03-29 at 09:53 -0500, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> Rahul Sundaram <sundaram at fedoraproject.org>:
> > You arent? The claim that mp3 wasnt patented followed up statements that
> > Red Hat should pay up a patent license for half a million dollars surely
> > looked like controversial to me from a open source advocate.
> 
> I never claimed MP3 wasn't patented,

You claimed that mp3 patent doesnt affect decoders. 

>  and $50K is not half a million.
> Keep your facts straight, at least.  

Your calculations on $50 K for a patent license is already shown to be
wrong especially for a license that would be compatible with open source
licenses. 

> 
> > Thats exactly what would happen. You can talk about all you want about
> > support open formats but if you dont actually build up volume nobody is
> > going to use it. If mp3 was supported out of the box in Fedora, why
> > would there be any incentive left for anyone to use ogg codecs?
> 
> Um...because Ogg is a better format?

We already support the better format very well. Adding support for
patent restricted formats in Fedora is just against the primary goals of
the project IMO. 


> 
> > Those are Fedora users too. Should we abandon them?
> 
> Zealots drive me crazy.  Poke one in the wrong place and his brain
> just shuts down entirely.
> 
> Read my lips: nobody is talking about 'abandoning' any user, distribution,
> or format.  Adding support for what users actually want is not abandonment.

How do you add propose that we add support for mp3 formats in Fedora
without abandoning the rights for derivative distributions to make
modifications and redistribute all the code included in Fedora? Again
its not merely proprietary but also shackled by patents. Are you happy
with just adding support for mp3 or would WMA support follow up on that
next?


Rahul