Fedora 31 Lands Good GStreamer AAC & H.264 Support

[RahulSundaram]

This is the type of idiotic thinking that prevents me from using Fedora or even considering it a serious product.

Your real beef is with software patents. Not Fedora

[RahulSundaram]

They're community created pages.

Correct. Creating a bash script that is part of the official package repository falls under contributor infringement. It really is no different from hosting the packages directly. Community created documentation or forum posts are not curated by the project and don't have the same constraints

[Britoid]

Correct. Creating a bash script that is part of the official package repository falls under contributor infringement. It really is no different from hosting the packages directly. Community created documentation or forum posts are not curated by the project and don't have the same constraints

Would fetching OpenH264 at install time from Cisco be a violation? Similar to what Firefox does.

[RahulSundaram]

Would fetching OpenH264 at install time from Cisco be a violation? Similar to what Firefox does.

No but Fedora already does that

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/OpenH264

[skeevy420]

Yeah, right and at the same time:

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/setup_rpmfusion/

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Third_party_repositories

So, hosting links to patent-infringing repos is OK while having a script for that is not OK. There's so much sense to it.

I agree. One page "saying we neither support XYZ nor even provide instructions to do XYZ due to legal liability reasons" and another page saying "here's how to do all the XYZ stuff we said we didn't support for legal liability reasons" is a bit misleading and confusing.

Britoid

IMHO, if that's the case, then that make it even worse as it's direct evidence that shows that the community contributed content isn't held to the same legal standards as officially contributed content. At the least Fedora should remove all the RPMFusion stuff from its guides and stick to just that Third_party_repositories page.

In general, no, because of the risk of liability for contributory patent infringement. Refer here for more details.

That said, them starting that sentence with "In general, no" basically throws my entire technical/semantics argument right out of the window due to how it gives that sentence a vague meaning that can be tweaked at Fedora's whim to suit their current needs.

On technical merit based on what they're trying to infer with that statement, I'm right and they should tweak their documentation.

Based on what they actually wrote and how it has a variable meaning with a built-in goal post mover, I'm wrong and they don't have to do a thing.

[RahulSundaram]

That said, them starting that sentence with "In general, no" basically throws my entire technical/semantics argument right out of the window due to how it gives that sentence a vague meaning that can be tweaked at Fedora's whim to suit their current needs.

Read the disclaimer on the top of the relevant pages. There are no answers that will cover every possible situation in a black and white way.

For a lot of questions around issues of patent laws or laws in general, the answer is usually "it depends". Unless the very specific situation has an exact law that covers that (very unlikely) or a similar situation has been tested in court (more likely but still not entirely determinative), whether something is permissible or is in violation of applicable patent laws for instance is going to depend on the details (ex: Texas is known to be a very patent friendly state. Simply filing it there makes it likely for the alleged patent holder to win)

[Mario Junior]

Fedora can't do that

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Software_Patents

Providing a means to automatically compile is no different from providing the binary packages from a legal perspective

Ubuntu gives an option during the installation to install proprietary codecs and other things since 2000 a.C. So, what is the problem to Fedora do the same?

[finalzone]

Ubuntu gives an option during the installation to install proprietary codecs and other things since 2000 a.C. So, what is the problem to Fedora do the same?

Ask the software patent lawyers. Fedora has to abide to the US patent laws so providing such options without paying royalty fee is asking for legal trouble.

[RahulSundaram]

Ubuntu gives an option during the installation to install proprietary codecs and other things since 2000 a.C. So, what is the problem to Fedora do the same?

Canonical doesn't have the same risk exposure as Red Hat. Location, size of the company, profit etc matters

[angrypie]

http://endsoftpatents.org