On Jul 18, 2007, Max Spevack <mspevack@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > 4) To what extent is it appropriate for hooks or other "stuff that > makes it easier for someone to do non-free stuff like CodecBuddy" to > exist in Fedora? We need to decide on this from a philosophical > standpoint. The lawyers will help us with the legal standpoint. How about keeping this information not in CodecBuddy itself, but rather in xml pages in Fedora servers, but in such a way that users can easily reconfigure their CodecBuddies to pull the information from other locations as well. Then, the community that's not encumbered by US law can create information that the Fedora project itself can't recommend. Then, we could ship it with a default configuration that points at information that only explains why we can't include support for such and such formats, but that provides information about how to configure CodecBuddy to use an alternate source of CodecBuddy information that makes it easy to install the non-Free stuff, and perhaps inform the user that alternate sources of information for CodecBuddy may be available elsewhere, but that Fedora itself cannot recommend them or the software they might suggest. This will then make for a one-step education for users, after which they can make a decision as to whether to use this alternate configuration that recommends non-Free Software, or look for alternate CodecBuddy configuration files in the internet. Since CodecBuddy would be used by users as means to obtain information and software that can decode formats they don't have software to decode, having it obtain information from the internet before obtaining the software per se wouldn't be a major issue. That said, we could include the educational-only message in the CodecBuddy package itself, and use file:// URLs to make them available even when disconnected from the internet. -- Alexandre Oliva http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/ FSF Latin America Board Member http://www.fsfla.org/ Red Hat Compiler Engineer aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org} Free Software Evangelist oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org} _______________________________________________ fedora-advisory-board mailing list fedora-advisory-board@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-advisory-board
