Fedora Present and Future: a Fedora.next 2014 Update (Part II, “What’s Happening?”)

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Mon, Mar 31, 2014 at 05:17:02PM -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Mon, 2014-03-31 at 09:17 -0500, Rex Dieter wrote:
> > Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> > 
> > > - VLC
> > > 
> > > Free software video player, but with a requirement (or at least can
> > > use if available) proprietary / patented / ugly / semi-legal codecs.
> > > Currently packaged in RPMFusion for reasons I'm not clear on.
> > 
> > I've looked into this a bit, and discussed with other distro packagers and 
> > vlc upstream.
> > 
> > VLC is fairly modular, and it's unencumbered bits could be brought to fedora 
> > and the other stuff live in some -freeworld subpkg in rpmfusion. 
> > 
> > Implementing this would be a bit of work, but worth it in my opinion.  I 
> 
> Well, I'm not so sure. A *lot* of people really don't understand the
> patent issue. Like, at all. They don't understand modularity. Like, at
> all. To a lot of people, the thing called 'vlc' is a magic black box
> that plays every video ever. They "install VLC" and then they play
> videos. This is the limit of their understanding.

Right.  I think my question was too subtle :-(

It wasn't about whether VLC could go into Fedora, but if there going
to be a ring, with the Fedora name, where basically anything goes
including software of insalubrious legality (in the US).  And I guess
the answer is no.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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