Web site suggestions.

[Robin Laing]

Bevan C. Bennett wrote:
> Robin Laing wrote:
> 
> 
> 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.

It is a shame that companies are doing all that they can to prevent 
the growth of Linux.  Look at Microsofts paying SCO to fight.  (search 
for links)  DeCSS was developed for the purpose of playing DVD's on Linux.

Even if the site cannot be officially sanctioned by Fedora and RedHat, 
it doesn't mean that it cannot be setup.  If you follow and search the 
Archives you can find most of these pachages mentioned.  The problem 
is one single site.  Even when I typed in "yum update" yesterday, I 
ended up with a dependency error so yum is not perfect.  Some sites 
have part of the package but you have to download libs from another 
site.  Of course a new user needs to set it up for all the "other" 
providers.  Especially the signatures for security.

Ripping or even playing CD's could become a problem without codecs as 
the music industries want to put more copy protections on the CD's.  I 
have even seen suggestions of using WMP 9 with DRM for protection.

We may have one blessing if the EU forces Microsoft to not include 
Windows Media Player.  It would be nice if something similiar could 
occur in the US and Canada.

-- 
Robin Laing