Why are (unencrypted) DVD players forbidden?

[Alexandre Oliva <aoliva redhat com>]

On Jul  4, 2005, Rahul Sundaram <sundaram redhat com> wrote:

> Standard response for Fedora has always been no support for any
> proprietary or legally encumbered software.

> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ForbiddenItems

I don't think DVD playing software should be included in this list.
In fact, there's no point in not including software that can play
unencrypted DVDs, for those who have their own unencrypted content, or
those who live in places where DVD encryption is not even legal.

Getting the code that uses the decryption machinery present in DVD
drives into a separate, dlopen()able shared library should be pretty
easy.  I bet someone has already done that ;-)

So what's the excuse to not include such nice software as Ogle and
libdvdread (but not libdvdcss)?

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva {redhat com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist  oliva {lsd ic unicamp br, gnu.org}