On encouraging Macromedia & others to supply repos for Fedora

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 10/20/06, Benjy Grogan <benjy.grogan at gmail.com> wrote:
> How did that official agreement come about?

There is no official agreement as part of the fedora project.  You'd
have to ask people involved with mplug.org as to how the
re-distribution arrangement was made.  You'll notice that mplug offers
packages for several distros.  In no way is that repository service a
fedora-specific affair, regardless of the fact that Warren is
involved.

If memory serves me correctly, that re-distribution agreement was
secured in the timeframe before Warren was hired as a RedHat employee.
 It is essentially a community initiative, not sponsored by Fedora nor
by Redhat and it would exist regardless of Warren's status as a Redhat
employee now or his activity in what is now the Fedora Project.  I
believe this flash repo was established during the timeframe of
fedora.us activity, before the re-incarnation as the Fedora Project.

I don't think its inappropriate for the annouce-list to carry
annoucements concerning legally obtainable 3rd party packages, even if
they are proprietary. I'd welcome annoucements about new vmware or
crossover office packages from verifiably authentic distributors of
those applications, even if I do not use them myself.

If people are confused into thinking these flash annoucements are more
'official' arrangements than they really are.. then perhaps warren
should use a mailing alias for these annoucements that is specific for
the task, instead of reusing his own email address when sending. So
for those of us without historical perspective will not assume that
such a message written from warren expresses Fedora doctrine.

Personally, I think such agreements between community members and
aother proprietary companies will be difficult to duplicate.  I'm
still somewhat shocked that the macromedia agreement is in place at
all, considering the language in the licensing agreement that is
publicly available from macromedia/adobe's website  concerning
authorized re-distribution. And no I don't have access to the terms of
the agreement between mplug+mirrors and macromedia/adobe. For all I
know there is an NDA involved.

Besides issues associated with clickthrough EULAs, which proprietary
software distribution will have to deal with, my understanding is that
the primary motivation for control of distribution of no-cost software
from proprietary vendors is accurate record keeping of the number of
distributed copies.  If proprietary vendors are unwilling to give up
that control, and let community help with the packaging tasks, there's
not much community members can do about it except stand at the company
gates hand-in-hand, singing a foss-focused version of 'we are the
world' lyrics.

-jef"snarky lyrics go here"spaleta