Fedora - time to blink

[Ranjan Maitra]

On Fri, 25 Nov 2011 15:58:58 -0600 Frantisek Hanzlik
<franta at hanzlici.cz> wrote:

> Tim wrote:
> > On Fri, 2011-11-25 at 14:24 -0500, Matt Rose wrote:
> >> Ah, and the license restriction canard.  I was actually expecting this
> >> one.  If Fedora can't distribute this software because of license
> >> restrictions, how come RPMFusion can, and Ubuntu can, and SuSE can,
> >> and, and, and.
> > 
> > Different goals, and others not caring about breaking laws, or not being
> > bound by the same laws, not caring about sticking to certain licenses,
> > exposing users to patent encumbrances and so on and so forth, versus a
> > distro which intends to only include free software.
> > 
> > The latter one can be very important to some people (whether that be
> > developers or users).  If you ever get threatened with a computer
> > software audit, you'll have nothing to worry about.
> > 
> > Some distros run the risk, by including some things, just hoping that
> > they'll get away with it.  Others have done deals with the devil, to be
> > allowed do so.  Deals which can come back to bite them, later on.
> > 
> > You're not going to get far arguing that Fedora should do something, if
> > it has a goal that it actually should not.  Such removal of things like
> > MP3 playback are not casual, nor mere omissions.
> 
> License restrictions are one thing, but IMO Fedora did mistakes in
> free SW preference too - e.g. in each version of Fedora for several
> recent years I had to replace cripled and unmaintained wodim with
> original cdrtools, because otherwise I won't able burn CD/DVD media.

Interesting. I have never had this problem, though I confess I burn
things sparingly nowadays...

Ranjan