Fedora meeting Mono Half-Way

[Patrick Barnes]

John Morris wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-12-19 at 02:01, Paul F. Johnson wrote:
>
> > Nope. No flags. Nothing. rpm purity. If you had that sort of thing in
> > there, you could equally have the flag in to support mp3 on xmms, mpegs
> > for Totem and all the other bits Red Hat have played it safe on.
>
> I wouldn't have a problem with that either.  For example, RedHat ships
> xmms with a modified tarball to outright remove the code to support mp3,
> which violates the pristine source principle, but the law is the law. 
> However, the .spec has everything needed and will happily build mp3
> support if you insert the pristine source back in.  MP3 support is
> illegal in the US but isn't in many other jurisdictions so making it
> easy for those places to get it working makes sense.
>
> More to the point with mono though is the precedent set with Java.  Long
> before gcj was developed enough to build the java support for various
> packages RedHat was shipping *-java packages.  In this case all I was
> proposing was that if those who care deeply about mono contribute the
> extra bits so that a .spec can support a build time switch to allow a
> -mono package to pop out it might not be a bad thing to have in the
> mainline instead pushing the whole package into a fork.
>
> But let me be clear, I would object to Fedora actually shipping a single
> -mono package because it would make mono a build requirement and mono is
> DANGEROUS[1]. 
>
> [1] Dangerous needs to be in bold and blinking but I only send ascii so
> use your imagination.
>
>   
Even making it easier is in that legally foggy area.  It's this little
thorn we call 'contributory infringement'.  Red Hat/Fedora can't even do
anything to make it easier to 'infringe' upon copyrights or patents.  As
far as Red Hat shipping Java, that is a very different thing.  Red Hat
Enterprise Linux continues to ship with the capabilities of Sun's Java. 
Red Hat got a license to distribute Java.  There is no such license
available for Mono, because the Mono project itself is what is
infringing.  Mono cannot offer us or Red Hat a license because they do
not have an open license from Microsoft.  Microsoft continues to hold
patents on technologies that Mono implements.  Until Microsoft awards an
open patent for those technologies that is compatible with Red Hat and
Fedora's requirements, Mono will continue to be a non-starter for
Fedora.  If upstream should begin to include the necessary bits and have
them enabled by default, there's no reason we would have to disable
those bits so long as they do not directly infringe upon anyone's IP, we
just can't enable the bits ourselves.  On the bright side, the patents
will eventually expire.  ;-)

-- 
Patrick "The N-Man" Barnes
nman64 at n-man.com

http://www.n-man.com/
-- 
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