On Wed, 2006-05-17 at 10:52 -0400, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote: > 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? > There's no way we can provide an mp3->ogg translator w/o violating the patent, can we? -sv