Web site suggestions.

[Bevan C. Bennett]

Robin Laing wrote:
> As many have pointed out before, there are alot of packages and codecs 
> that fit nicely for the home user that are not included with Fedora. 
> This is for many reasons and most of them have something to do with 
> laywers.
> 
> My suggestion is a Fedora WWW site that is outside the US as a single 
> point of reference for all these different applications and codecs. Even 
> if provides decent links to the various sites around the world would be 
> better than what many new users have to go through to find that codec 
> for MP3's or play DVD's.

Even if the website were outside the US, Fedora as a US organization 
cannot officially condone the illegal use of software. Private 
repositories for these packages are easily discovered for those who live 
somewhere without such laws or for those willing to personally risk 
infringing use.

Yes, it's perhaps stupid that certain corporations han maintain a 
licensing stranglehold on certain popular codecs (even if they did come 
up with them in the first place), and prevent them from being used with 
GPL software.

The very simple difference is that, because Windows is not zero-price, 
Microsoft can absorb all of the licensing costs to these other companies 
neccessary to legally include their algorithms in the packaged product. 
Apple can (and does) do the same thing.

A company could set themselves up selling properly licensed software for 
mp3 and dvd use, but they could not use GPL code to create their 
software without some interesting shenanigans, because the license will 
prohibit the end result from being GPLd.

The DVD issue is really annoying, but I just rip all my CDs to .ogg and 
avoid the MP3 fiasco entirely. For a user without a pre-existing 
collection, it's easy to use the included tools in Fedora to do this. As 
an added benefit, not having any mp3s on your system makes you less 
likely to be targeted as an alleged music pirate by large overzealous 
acronyms.