Thomas Vander Stichele wrote:
Hi,
Well the market chose. It seems people that matter (which influence
purchases) care more about FOSS ethics than marketing people think. At
this point squandering all the goodwill accrued by taking a firm FOSS
stand would be something very stupid for Red Hat to do.
I think that is a good position to take. It's a different position to
take than saying "we can't ship this for legal reasons".
The legal situation is unclear and we have to fallback on lawyers for
that but the principles of Fedora clearly is or should be to everyone
involved in the community.
In some cases even more - Debian is still shipping GPL'd mp3 decoding
code as part of the main distribution; see a recent discussion on
debian-legal.
Debian is not a commercial organization in the US. IMO Debian is taking
a legal risk by doing this but even if they get sued, then the court
can just order them to stop. They dont have to worry about losing money.
Red Hat can lose millions. For anyone wanting to sue Red Hat is a better
target than Debian for the same reasons unfortunately and hence we have
to be even more cautious about what we do compared to Debian et al.
Fedora Foundation might change *some* aspects of this but the design
principles dont go away.
--
Rahul
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