codec buddy, fluendo, etc.

[Bill Nottingham]

Toshio Kuratomi (a.badger at gmail.com) said: 
>> 2.  What improvements would we like to see in Codec Buddy and/or codeina?
>
> My number one gripe is that there's no help for people who can get codecs 
> where they are not patented.  As a minimal step, mentioning that the 
> patents don't exist everywhere and that free software implementations do 
> exist would make me feel better.  However, that is only going to be helpful 
> to more advanced users who will read that and know that they can turn to 
> google for help.  We need to come up with questions for the lawyers that 
> determine just how far we can push the envelope.  (Can we add the wording I 
> mention?  Can we point people to a specific google search?)

Spot has been through this a few times, as far as I recall. I believe
the wording is that we are allowed to mention sites that host software
that 'for whatever reasons' Fedora cannot include. We can not go into
specifics as to what that software is, how that relates to why we can't
include it, etc., which makes linking to it directly from any CodecBuddy
notifications pretty much impossible; that's why we don't have any such
links on the wiki right now.

As a tangential point - codec buddy falls into a different concept of code
vs. content. Autodownloader data is free (beer) restricted, content for use
with free (speech) code. The fluendo plugins are restricted (free (beer) in
the MP3 case) code for use with potentially free (beer, speech) content.

Bill