Jeff Spaleta wrote:
On 8/18/05, Thorsten Leemhuis <fedora@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
But if some Add-On-Repos would provide such a CD-ISO as add-on in their
Repo and if this CD is well known to everyone ("hey, go and get that
Fedora-Add-On-CD, without it Fedora is not fully functional") it would
solve the problem for most people in the freeworld more easily.
Logic fault:
if its well known to everyone there would be no need to point to it by
anyone else.
Semantics aside and without touching the policy issue that Sundaram
brought up about whether its the right policy decision, no... redhat
as the managing entity cannot willfully point people to a collection
of software they know is infringing..even if its public knowledge by
other means. It doesn't matter if this makes logical sense, we are
talking about US law here.. logic does not apply. Legal risk is legal
risk, the entity who is liable has to evaluate the situation and
determine where the line is as to what behavior brings unacceptable
risk. Since redhat is the one exposed to the legal liability at the
moment as the managing entity, its very difficult to make any
compelling argument that second guesses their legal opinion as an
outside layperson, simply because our assets are not on the line.
-jef"is waiting for someone in the community to offer to indemnify
redhat against all liability for contributory infringement"spaleta
What I keep hearing in this thread is that RedHat's position as the
"managing entity" of Fedora is holding Fedora back in the area of
multimedia.
Don't get me wrong; most Fedora work gets done by people with redhat.com
email addresses. But it is true that RedHat represents a nice *central*
target for a legal suit, which is just what patent holders like. It's
so old-school and comfortable to have some central entity, with money,
to attack. How might the promised Fedora Foundation change this?
Personally, I'd be happy if the installation offered the ability to add
entries to yum.repos.d (a big hurdle for newbies) which was not limited
to, but did include Livna, accompanied by the expected stern warnings
about respecting your local laws.
Adding repositories is not a big deal for us old hands; It's just a
PITA, nothing more. But the newbie is already overwhelmed by switching
OSes. To them, "Fedora just doesn't support multimedia". All
discussions of "feature parity" aside, when's the last time you saw an
Ogg Theora stream on Yahoo's site?
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