Open Letter: Why I, Kevin Kofler, am not rerunning for FESCo

[Sir Gallantmon (ニール・ゴンパ)]

On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 1:04 AM, Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler at chello.at> wrote:

> Sir Gallantmon (ニール・ゴンパ) wrote:
> > Though, there are some instances where the prevailing opinion should be
> > ignored, when there is no solid evidence to back it up, e.g. Mono and the
> > like.
>
> Indeed, I also think defending freedom is important (and it was part of my
> campaign). But I've also been unhappy with FESCo's decisions in that
> domain,
> e.g.:
> * libvdpau was approved for Fedora. This is a library which:
>  - only accelerates decoding patent-encumbered MPEG family video codecs.
>    ALL software which uses that is in RPM Fusion, not Fedora, anyway.
>  - has no actual Free Software implementations. It is ONLY implemented by
>    proprietary drivers.
>  So what does Fedora have to gain from this pseudo-Free library?
> * in at least 2 occasions, so-called "Open Core" [1] crippleware has been
>  not only approved for Fedora (which makes sense, as IMHO we should accept
>  everything under a Free license and with no patent issues as a Fedora
>  package), but advertised as a Fedora Feature, which I consider to be
>  completely counterproductive, as it gives free press coverage to such
>  crippleware and sends a message to companies that releasing some crippled
>  shareware version under a Free Software license is enough to get your
>  product advertised as Free or "Open Source" all over the planet. My
>  complaints about giving free advertising to such crippleware have been
>  entirely ignored.
>
> [1] http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2009/10/16/open-core-shareware.html
>
>        Kevin Kofler
>
>
Wait, I thought libvdpau had a VA-API backend? And I thought Fedora included
a crippled version of mplayer in its repositories? Either way, it is true
that VDPAU currently only works with MPEG formats, but nothing says that the
library can't be modified to support other formats, does it?

If I'm wrong, then shouldn't it be RPM Fusion?
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