Martin Sourada wrote:
On Mon, 2007-09-03 at 15:21 +0200, Jeroen van Meeuwen wrote:
God no! If we do that, we lose. On a personal note; I'd rather make it
as hard as possible to ever use anything I can't read any source code
of, or that isn't licensed to permit me to do whatever I want to do with it.
I guess he meant rather GPL software that cannot be shipped in U.S. due
to patent issues, as most of the software provided by the most widely
used third party repos (livna and fresh) is GPL. There are many examples
suggesting why this should be as easy as possible - ability to play
legally bought DVDs, ability to play mp3, DivX, H.264, ... audio/video.
Ability to install mplayer during installation, ability to install
gstreamer-plugins-{ugly,bad}...
If a legally bought DVD doesn't play on Fedora, that doesn't mean the
real problem lies within Fedora. If you disagree; how does that make it
a Fedora problem exactly?
If we do not support this we loose.
We are strong fighters in the army of the Free (as in Freedom, not
Gratis). We lose some, but we win an awful lot.
And remember, all the things I am
talking about are licenced under licences that are acceptable into
Fedora, only the damn U.S. wrongly implemented patents for software
(where they actually rather hinder progress than encourage it) prohibits
us from shipping them with Fedora. Proprietary drivers are there as
well, but that's not why we should make these repos easy accessible.
We should encourage usage of FOSS software, but how can we do that when
we are prohibited by U.S. laws to ship FOSS software that implements
patented things? And no, I cannot play DVDs using vanilla Fedora and no,
theora isn't better than H.264 (implemented in FOSS x264 codec) and yes,
I can use ogg vorbis instead of mp3, but then my HW player will not play
them.
Restrictively patented software may, in your and many others' opinion,
still be Free; I my opinion, it's not. It may be FOSS, but it isn't Free
in the most pure sense of the word; If I can't share what I use, freely,
with someone else just because there so happens to be an ocean in
between and my buddy is living in the states; that to me isn't free.
No matter how we may differ in opinion though, freedom is essential; I
think we all agree on that. Fedora however seems to consider freedom to
be /freedom for everyone/, so independent from where you live or what
the local law says you can or cannot do. That is what I encourage.
--
Kind regards,
Jeroen van Meeuwen
-kanarip
--
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