Fedora's way forward

Hans de Goede j.w.r.degoede at hhs.nl
Wed Mar 29 19:49:51 UTC 2006



Michael J Knox wrote:
> Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>> [Please quote more appropriately rather than including the entire mail
>> while replying to it]
>>
>>> Right on the money Eric.
>>>
>>> I love Fedora Core. In the world of Linux it is The Class Act. However I
>>> would like to see it's core philosophical paradigm expanded to
>>> accommodate the pragmatic reality of what the average user really wants
>>> and what he actually installs on his Fedora machine in practice.
>>
>> You mean to say that Fedora should give up its support towards Free and
>> open source software and adopt proprietary formats and software in the
>> name of pragmatism. Not a good idea IMO. There are already other
>> distributions out there which does this if this is really the only thing
>> you want. 
> 
> Rahul,
> 
> I don't see where he said give up on free and open source formats and 
> software. In fact, he said *expanded* not "give up on". I suggest not 
> putting words in peoples mouths (or emails as it is).
> 
> Nor do I think telling someone "There are already other distributions 
> out there which does this if this is really the only thing you want" is 
> the correct way to tackle, what is, a real world issue.
> 

How about a fake gstreamer-mp3-plugin, which in turn then will ask to 
user if its ok to download the real thing from fluendo, and if this is 
nescesarry first show the license screen.

I think that the way to tackle this is to create a system where Fedora 
can download codecs for users and will ask users if its ok to download 
the nescesarry coded, show the license first, etc. This way we could 
include realmedia support too, I'm sure real will be willing to offer 
their codec for download in a suitable format.

I see 3 problems with my own suggestion:
-its pragmatic and doesn't meet our ideals 100%, I for one
  am divided on this issue
-GPL apps will not be allowed to use these codecs, unless they come
  with a license acception. I believe we can find a way to handle this,
  like adding the capability to gstreamer (or another framework) to allow
  the app to specify additonal codec search paths and / or if it want
  proprietary codecs in general.
-not all codecs will be available for all platforms we want to support,
  this will either have to be accepted or we could use something like
  qemu to work around this.

If enough people believe this is a good idea I'm willing to sync some 
time into this.

Regards,

Hans




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