[fab] Pimping Fluendo for MP3 support

[Jeremy Katz]

On Wed, 2006-05-17 at 10:52 -0400, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:
> On Tue, 16 May 2006, Jeremy Katz wrote:
> > On Tue, 2006-05-16 at 18:17 -0400, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:
> > > Simple, legal, solves a lot of people's problems.  At the cost of a bit of 
> > > moral high ground, but if we can educate while solving the user's problem, 
> > > maybe that's not a bad tradeoff after all.  Somnething to be said for a 
> > > good bully pulpit.
> > 
> > And if we give in here, where does it end?  Why not ship freely
> > redistributable binary apps if they "solve user problems"?  And then,
> > maybe next is binary X drivers.  
> 
> The slippery slope argument is for suckers.  :)

Maybe.  It has to be made, though.

> I'm not proposing that we "abandon all of our hard-fought moral 
> principles".
> 
> I am proposing that we make a real effort to educate people, not only 
> about the position we hold, but *why we hold it*.  Because to the vast 
> majority of people, our position seems arbitrary and stupid -- which means 
> that we're not doing a good enough job of selling it.
> 
> What if there were a big link on the default desktop that said "Do you 
> want MP3?"  And then the user clicks on a link, and the link tells a 
> story.

Frankly, I don't think they'll read it.  Which is a shame, but I don't
know how to change habits of users which have existed since the dawn of
time.  And I also don't think that cluttering the desktop is the way
forward (I also expect that cluttering the desktop would be met with
cries of anger and pitchforks from the maintainers of the desktop ;)

[snip]
> And then, at the end, it tells you how to get MP3 codecs legally, and 
> urges you to use those codecs to translate all of your MP3 files to OGG.

Should we point out the quality loss there?

> Or would that be "giving in" too much?

I think that making some of the legal options (such as Fluendo) more
known via things like the wiki makes sense.  Putting something on the
desktop, on the other hand, is less appealing

Jeremy