Fedora Desktop future- RedHat moves

[Da Rock]

On Sun, 2008-04-27 at 11:44 -0700, Antonio Olivares wrote:
> --- Francis Earl <lunitik at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > > Apparently some of the MP3 patents are supposedly
> > > dying out, but not so soon :(
> > > 
> > >
> >
> http://www.tunequest.org/a-big-list-of-mp3-patents/20070226/
> > 
> > I was under the impression they were expiring around
> > 2010, thank you for
> > that link. The big one there is Alcatel-Lucent as
> > they are the guys
> > really throwing their muscle around.
> > 
> > > As for the apple Ipod, and others they can get
> > hacked
> > > and unpaid music can be placed onto them.  I have
> > some
> > > students that are very bright in this area, they
> > put
> > > music onto cell phones without paying for the
> > music. 
> > > They are sharp with computers and electronics but
> > ask
> > > them about academics and they do not answer.  They
> > do
> > > need to be dissapointed with Apple as they do not
> > care
> > > what they do, they know that someone, somewhere is
> > > working to ensure that they can do other things
> > that
> > > Apple did not want them to do. :)
> > 
> > While such things are always possible, it doesn't
> > make it a good thing.
> > You can actually get your iPod working on your Linux
> > box though, it is
> > the codecs and the related copyrights that are bad.
> > Just because your
> > students get away with breaking the law, doesn't
> > mean it would be smart
> > for RedHat to facilitate that...>
> Agreed :)

By the same token they shouldn't be actively making it difficult either.
There is a balance to be struck here- both sides of this take away
freedom from the user to choose and put in place what they want. In this
case Fedora and non-free software are at extremes. A lot of distros are
finding (or at least trying to) the very fine balance in between.