On Tue, 16 May 2006, Jeremy Katz wrote: > On Tue, 2006-05-16 at 18:17 -0400, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote: > > Simple, legal, solves a lot of people's problems. At the cost of a bit of > > moral high ground, but if we can educate while solving the user's problem, > > maybe that's not a bad tradeoff after all. Somnething to be said for a > > good bully pulpit. > > And if we give in here, where does it end? Why not ship freely > redistributable binary apps if they "solve user problems"? And then, > maybe next is binary X drivers. The slippery slope argument is for suckers. :) I'm not proposing that we "abandon all of our hard-fought moral principles". I am proposing that we make a real effort to educate people, not only about the position we hold, but *why we hold it*. Because to the vast majority of people, our position seems arbitrary and stupid -- which means that we're not doing a good enough job of selling it. What if there were a big link on the default desktop that said "Do you want MP3?" And then the user clicks on a link, and the link tells a story. It tells the whole story about how Fruanhofer/Thomson basically screwed the entire world by suckering engineers into using the MP3 codec, and only *then* charging patent royalties. It also tells the plucky story of a young developer named Monty who decided that MP3 was a bunch of bullshit and came up with his own codecs. It tells you why Fedora chooses those codecs. And then, at the end, it tells you how to get MP3 codecs legally, and urges you to use those codecs to translate all of your MP3 files to OGG. Or would that be "giving in" too much? --g --------------------------------------------------------------- Greg DeKoenigsberg || Fedora Foundation || fedoraproject.org Be an Ambassador || http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors ---------------------------------------------------------------
