The Multimedia Question

Jeff Spaleta jspaleta at gmail.com
Thu Jul 19 18:55:55 UTC 2007


On 7/19/07, Tom spot Callaway <tcallawa at redhat.com> wrote:
> Which other proprietary apps should we link to? Acrobat opens PDFs that
> evince doesn't. What about flash?

I think there's a significant difference between a situation like
evince and acrobat, and the situation that has prompted codec buddy.
Evince is a legitimate open but buggy application that can be
registered against at least one mime type and attempt to access the
data.  The question is how do we gracefully, empathicly interact with
users who run into a mime type that we as a community don't have a
legitmate/legal application to present to the user that will attempt
to read the data.

I don't believe that just telling them, "Sorry you can't access that
data with open tools," is the best answer across the board. Having a
user walk away from the long term benefits of using Fedora and an open
system to use a completely closed system to access what they consider
to be important legacy data cannot be in the best interests of our
long term goals.  Whether or not I think avi data is specifically
important enough to worry about is immaterial. Legacy data gets
packaged in all sorts of proprietary formats, and we should be
providing a migration path for as much of that data as possible that
users can choose to take.

-jef




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