F8(1) vs multimedia production(0)

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 11:07 PM, Lyvim Xaphir <knightmerc at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Fantastic work, Jeff.  Now we have yet another loyal fedora user jumping
> ship to go to ubuntu, after being told:
>

Thanks, its always nice to hear when people praise the very hard work I do
to relate the truth to people, instead of just telling them what they want
to hear. You don't want to hear the truth, you are free to ignore me.


> 1.  You need to put up with the crappy apps you already have
>

Actually i didn't say that. I pointed out exactly where the technical issues
are that can be address. I'm not going to lie to you or anyone. ffmpeg is a
problem.. it will continue to be a problem until it has support for runtime
detectable plugins.  I can't wish the problem away, or yell it away or hold
my breath until its fixed..or threaten to move to another distro.. none of
that solves the actual technical problem. All I can do is find and encourage
developers make use of a more flexible framework.


>
> 2.  You need to use your valuable time on this earth to code and not
> actually use the computer -- to help us with our crappy forced-licensing
> ideology which is never going to work anyway btw
>

Someone has to code this stuff, the code doesn't magically fall from the
code tree. Yes... you are absolutely right.. people's time is valuable..
developer time is the most precious of the resources that we have. We need
more of it.  And I will heartily thank anyone who uses their time to help
develop a robust video editing application which uses gstreamer as its
audio/video framework so we could get reasonable support for raw dv video
and theora editting in the distro.  Which reminds me I should go on to the
pitivi development lists and do some massive amounts of ego stroking to
encourage them to do more work.

> It's patently absurd when the infrastructure of Red Hat
> itself is in fact RUNNING THE USERS OFF!
>

It's not that we aren't sympathetic. I very much doubt that anyone likes the
software patent situation. Legal issues suck, but I'm not going to lie to
you about it. We will avoid some patent encumbered code based on Red Hat's
legal council because we are not interested in creating a situation where we
increase the legal risks for anyone. The legal risk of people like
downstream developers who base their work on Fedora. God forbid we
accidently cause a legal problem for an embedded developer showing off some
sort of mp3 capable device in Germany such that they are handed cease and
desist orders at the conference they are attending.
For reference:
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/index.cfm?NewsID=8723
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Police-Raids-51-CeBIT-Booths-For-Patent-Violations-80362.shtml

3 years running now, CeBit has seen German police raids over mp3 patent
infringement.  It would be really nice to ignore this, and make some
simple-minded claims that the problem is strictly a problem in the US and to
beat Red Hat up about it...but I can't, Fedora as a project can't, because
we have a larger international base and a growing number of downstream
distributions which make use of our tech. If we accidentally created a legal
problem for someone over a/v patents, I would feel far worse than I do about
hearing that I've lost users because we are in their opinion overly cautious
about breaking the law.

It's not just the home user that we care about nor just Red Hat's legal
risks as a sponsor. We care about the legal risks to our global Fedora
community, including the ones who might be doing development in Germany or
elsewhere where software patents lurk. Or currently we have a small
situation with trademarks on OpenOffice.org that is Brazil specific that we
need to work through so our Ambassadors and users there avoid a problem.

Now as a user you can either live with that or you can't. If you can, and
are interested in video production, make a pledge to work with me to find a
way to bring a robust gstreamer based video application forward for everyone
to make use of.

If you can't, then yes you are going to be happier using a distribution
other distros take a much more cavilier approach these issues. We are not
going to be cavilier with regard to legal risks. We take them seriously.


>
> Let's see how many more you run off.
>

Let me be clear. I do not need...nor do I desire for every single person to
be running Fedora. Users are not pogs... they are not pokemon...we do not in
fact have to catch them all. Does it help me or Fedora to lie to Gene and
attempt to keep him as a user? All I can do is be honest about what the
technical issues are..ffmpeg...and what the potential solutions
are..gstreamer. If he still chooses to distro shop instead of working on
solving the problem, I'm not going to run after him with pretty, empty
promises that someone else is going to do the work for him. Someone has to
do the work, or it's not going to get done. The pitivi developers would
probably welcome some more manhours.

The success of Fedora is not predicated on killing off any of the several
hundreds of distros listed by distrowatch and starving them of users. Nope
not the goal, not even slightly important. All we need to have is enough
users, and enough contributors, and enough developers, to sustain and drive
active development of the open source stack. Even with Gene moving over, I
feel confident we have enough users... I don't need to be greedy. Okay well
I do need to be somewhat greedy... I want more than my fair share of the
right users.  I am not going to go out of my way to court users as
consumers....especially in the area of video production, because I don't
have a lot to offer them. But I will go out of my way to court
contributors...especially in the area of video production, because Fedora
needs their help and I think we can offer them a lot in terms of supporting
their efforts to move video production forward and integrate it into the
default gnome stack. I know several of the existing fedora contributors with
experience with the gnome and gst code bases that would probably encourage
such an effort and a new contributor to lead the way.


-jef
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