Re: Fedora Desktop future- RedHat moves

On Tue, 2008-04-22 at 22:26 -0500, Arthur Pemberton wrote:
On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 6:06 PM, Patrick O'Callaghan
<pocallaghan@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Tue, 2008-04-22 at 15:57 -0700, Francis Earl wrote:
> Yes, despite it's legal ramifications... far better to risk your company
> to appease users. It's not like it's not available for Fedora, but Red
> Hat doesn't risk the future of the company on it.
>
> Google for 'Microsoft billion mp3'
>
> Mark is rich, but that's about 3 times his worth right there... he isn't
> licensing MP3 or any other codec for his distro, Microsoft just licensed
> it from the wrong people.
>
> Now wonder consider ffmpeg for instance has Apple codecs, mpg2/4 and
> Microsoft codecs just to name a few, and ask yourself whether it's smart
> to distribute this stuff.
>
> Only reason he gets away with it is because Ubuntu represents such a low
> market share that it's not worth it today.

AFAIK he doesn't "distribute" it (for some meaning of "distribute"),
just makes it easy to get. I may be wrong (and I've no interest in
arguing about it), but I think the Fedora rationale for not doing the
same thing has more to do with avoiding lockin than avoiding lawsuits.

RedHat employs lawyers. Unless the managed to employ only incompetent
lawyers, I'm guessing they know more than you on this. So making such
statements as "as far as you know" is useless.

The statement beginning AFAIK is with reference to Mark Shuttleworth (as
is perfectly obvious from context), and furthermore is a simple question
of fact which others have since corrected. Did I say RH had bad lawyers?
Did I say that RH took its decision with no legal basis? No and no.

Did RH take its decision for a mixture of reasons, some of which may not
be simply questions of legality? Gosh, a question without a black and
white answer.

poc

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