Fedora Planning Ahead For The Next 5 Years

[avis]

I'm not going to demostrate you any of these, as I don't care about all those use cases or formats

You perfectly represent the average Linux user. Thank you! Really appreciated.

[cynic]

You perfectly represent the average Linux user. Thank you! Really appreciated.

you perfectly represent the average forum user: you aren't able to read a post and understand it.
You just answer whatever goes into your head even if it is completely unrelated to what you're replying to.

[avis]

you perfectly represent the average forum user: you aren't able to read a post and understand it.
You just answer whatever goes into your head even if it is completely unrelated to what you're replying to.

An amazing reply, thanks a ton!

[OneTimeShot]

For those h264 lovers: the patents on the basic protocol expire in a few months. So you get to use your codec in FOSS.

Fortunately, h265 and later are effectively dead so yup - open video is here.

If you are a geek you can use AV1, but I don’t think normal people will care. Like they don’t care about MP3, Opus or AAC (which also have no unexpired patents)

[patrick1946]

"Fedora is for everyone"
"Fedora Linux Disabling Mesa's H.264 / H.265 / VC1 VA-API Support Over Legal Concerns"

To my understanding is the Idea that you use flatpak. There is a Firefox coming with Fedora Silverblue but you can install the Flatpak version.

[Awesomeness]

You get it for free, so it's expected.

No, the change was about utilizing features hardware vendors have already licensed the patents for and customers have paid for that by purchasing said hardware. The change was not about software-based implementations.

[avis]

No, the change was about utilizing features hardware vendors have already licensed the patents for and customers have paid for that by purchasing said hardware. The change was not about software-based implementations.

I trust RedHat's legal team a ton more than a random commenter on Phoronix, sorry. They wouldn't have disabled something had it been 100% legal in all jurisdictions.

I can imagine the issue is about Open Source, e.g. Mesa. If it came from AMD/Intel/etc it would be fine but it does not. RedHat is a purveyor of something they have not implemented/payed royalties for.

[cooperate]

"Fedora is for everyone"
"Fedora Linux Disabling Mesa's H.264 / H.265 / VC1 VA-API Support Over Legal Concerns"

That's a pathetic excuse. If that's the case then don't say "it's for everyone".

How does that contradict this statement? If anything, not shipping patented software makes Fedora be used by people where software patents apply like in US and Japan. So really, Fedora is the most “for everyone” distro.

[cooperate]

No, the change was about utilizing features hardware vendors have already licensed the patents for and customers have paid for that by purchasing said hardware. The change was not about software-based implementations.

Doesn’t work that way. The license doesn’t get transferred with the purchase of the GPU.

[avis]

Doesn’t work that way. The license doesn’t get transferred with the purchase of the GPU.

Thanks, this perfectly explains why Fedora/RedHat cannot ship Mesa with HW acceleration for patented codecs although ... I'm not so sure they have over 100K users which exempts them from any responsibility and royalties. In fact I'm quite sure they have a lot fewer active installations. According to various polls and distrowatch data Fedora is barely in top 10 of most popular Linux distros and all the Linux distros combined have maybe ~10 to 20 million users. Maybe RedHat just wants to avoid any possible issues.