[Novalug] Install/Tweak Fest at Oct Meeting?

Bryan J. Smith b.j.smith@ieee.org
Tue Sep 29 17:59:42 EDT 2009


Daniel --

I noted that Greg stated "company" then "Canonical" and only put "(Ubuntu also)"
in parenthesis, differentiating that his focus was on Canonical as far as company,
but that Ubuntu (not a company) is causing some of the same issues.  This is not
anything new to anyone who has been around Debian either.

I'm dumbfounded on what you mean by "but to slight the work" and "is a disservice"
with regards to anything Greg has stated.  Being exposed to many distros myself,
from-the-inside (ironically, not Fedora, despite my employer, so I can speak
objectively about many others), I don't see how Greg's comments could be taken
as such.

There is really no "middle ground" when it comes to legal issues such as
indemnification.  Either a distro does it, or it opens legal issues at any redistribution,
or possibly direct distribution by itself.  It is to be avoided in general, and explained
as such.

This isn't a scare tactic or anything as such.  And it's not just an American detail
either, as German laws on various IP can even be worse (as anyone who dealt with
SuSE prior to the Novell purchase knows).  The patent holders of IP around MP3
have had people arrested for redistribution at conferences.

When I am so tasked, I have had to outlaw redistribution of Linux inside of many of
my clients.  I had to legally warn people of such issues.  Now that I work for a vendor,
I have to avoid it, although I do still run into things sometimes (I normally just deal
with those related to Fedora-Red Hat, to be as objective as possible).

Again, the context here was the expectation of vendors to not merely license codecs
for their own, commercial, paid subscription customers, but for all of open source in
general.  While Red Hat has been willing to pay for development of clean room
fonts (e.g., Liberation) and other things, paying for codecs for Fedora will never
happen.

While I won't comment on any "disservice" a distribution is going the community when
it comes including troublesome IP (and it would be hypocritical as well**), I do think
it's a disservice to downplay serious indemnification issues.  There are many
redistributions of many Linux options that do ignore it, and are a liability that people
blindly inherit in their redistribution.

-- Bryan

**NOTE:  I hope you caught my reference to Rahul Sundaram of India, who produces
a Fedora Respin known as Omega.  Omega comes with open source distributed by
RPM Fusion in its base distribution (out-of-the-box), all clean room code but possibly
with IP ownership or other issues, hence why they are not in Fedora.

I'll also point out Warren Togami, one of the original University of Hawaii Fedora
Project members, who worked with Adobe to create a public YUM repository for its
products.  There are many examples.  But the indemnification issues of redistribution
are still there, and they need to be understood.

It's not a "disservice" to point out when some projects do the wrong thing and do not
make users aware or, worse yet, dismiss the valid concerns that other projects and
others in the community do sincerely point out.  Not for marketing reasons, but for
honest legal ones.  In fact, one would say the "marketing" is the other way.  ;)



----- Original Message ----
From: Daniel Chen <seven.steps@gmail.com>
To: greg pryzby <greg@pryzby.org>
Cc: NOVALUG <novalug@calypso2.tux.org>
Sent: Tuesday, September 29, 2009 5:29:56 PM
Subject: Re: [Novalug] Install/Tweak Fest at Oct Meeting?

On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 5:14 PM, greg pryzby <greg@pryzby.org> wrote:
> And companies like Canonical (Ubuntu also) make it TOO easy to get the
> closed bits and just side step the legal and opensource issue.

I can see how one would think this, but note that Ubuntu is not a
company. It is a Linux distribution whose paid core developers are
employed by Canonical.

Why do I make this distinction? Simple: I am, and have always been, a
community contributor to Ubuntu. Granted, I have been a core developer
for a time during which I had the luxury of contributing at my own
pace, but to slight the work of myriad volunteers who pour blood,
sweat, and tears into the project - be it Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora,
GNOME, KDE, Xfce, Linux, or whoever - is a disservice. I do not choose
to make it easy to get "closed bits and just side step the legal and
opensource issue."

Many people in the community appreciate having a streamlined way to
install these closed bits and have things work fairly painlessly;
others prefer a more stringent Free base. Both are means to an end,
which is to empower human beings.

-Dan
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