"Licensed" codes

[Mark Hoover]

 >> Killing off such a step forward for Red Hat users with a vague "I'm
 >> sure there will be ..." seems short-sighted and/or selfish (of Red
 >> Hat).

 > Well, to put it a different way, I personally feel (warning: Not
 > Speaking for Red Hat), that it's better for the success of open source
 > and Red Hat for Red Hat not to be sued into oblivion. :) I may be
 > biased, though.

 > And, from a legal standpoint, Red Hat just can't be providing such
 > software.

Everytime I've seen a reponse like this, I've sat here and wondered why 
it's always assumed that RedHat has to provide these for free.  I think 
it would be a great product offering if RedHat could get together 
perhaps with the developers of products like mplayer, xine, or whatever 
and license the codecs for use with these programs.

Now I know what you're saying.  The licensing of these codecs doesn't 
come cheap.  So we now offer a Multimedia CD for sale from RedHat's 
website which after X number are sold would re-coup the cost of 
licensing the codecs.  In addition, to stay valid, RedHat doesn't 
release the codec source code on this CD.

I'd be more than happy to pay for something like this and I'm sure many 
of the rest of us would as well so long as the price was kept reasonable.