Opinions welcome: Restructuring the system menus

Hans de Goede j.w.r.degoede at hhs.nl
Mon Dec 17 11:11:25 UTC 2007


Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Nicu Buculei <nicu_fedora <at> nicubunu.ro> writes:
>> There is one thing I personally would like to see about games and menu 
>> (and I expect it is not specs compliant): all unplayable the games 
>> because of no data available (needing the autodownloader to be run) in a 
>> separate menu, so I could ignore them easily in the Games Spin.
>> Yeah, they cold move from that menu in the proper location once the data 
>> is available, but this is really a "pie in the sky" scenario.
> 
> IMHO the right solution for this problem would be to ban autodownloader and 
> everything using it (or worse, requiring original proprietary and charged-for 
> game CDs) from the distribution. I see that tool as both an ugly kludge and a 
> way to circumvent Fedora's licensing requirements. It also sends the entirely 
> wrong message to upstream projects: before, it was "If you want to have your 
> game in Fedora, you have to fix your licensing.", now it's "We'll just hack 
> around it with autodownloader and ignore our Fedora Objectives entirely.". :-( 
> In addition, for data files where the license allows non-commercial 
> redistribution, it would IMHO be more user-friendly to have a fully-playable 
> package in rpmfusion non-free than an autodownloader hack in Fedora.
> 

Gee, thanks for the vote of confidence, autodownloader is for the cases where 
upstream can not or will not change the license. For example when I started 
packaging bolzplatz2006 (fun game) I contacted upstream and the upstream 
project lead said they would fix the license of the datafiles, at the end 
however one of upstreams major contributers wouldn't play ball.

To be more precise, atleast the following list of packages in Fedora is in 
Fedora because I negotiated an acceptable license with upstream, or fixed 
license issues by replacing troublesome parts, and that is the list which I 
remember right now, the real list is (much) longer:

glew
worminator
maniadrive-music
crystal-stacker
crystal-stacker-themes
alphabet-soup
crack-attack
TnL

And that is not counting all the packages where I transcoded sound from 
troublesome formats to free formats and patched the code to be able to handle 
those free formats.

How many license changes have _you_ negotiated recently?

Regards,

Hans




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