Slashdot Mirror
Fedora's New Test Lead Plans Changes
lisah writes "According to a NewsForge article by Bruce Byfield, new Fedora test lead Will Woods has a laundry list of changes he plans on making to enhance the Fedora testing process. 'There's always someone who will comment that Fedora is just Red Hat's beta test for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL),' says Woods. 'It's not true, and I want no one to have cause to say that ever again.'"
It's nice to see them acknowledge a testing issue, and present options to the community on how to best approach the problem.
The amazing thing is all of the people that are critical of Fedora. Even if it were a testbed for RedHat, it is a free distro. that is widely used--especially by the critics. I have no problems with it, and we use it on several development machines here.
If the critics would step up and help solve the problems, they'd quickly run out of things to complpain about.
We Apprentice Developers and Designers
Unlikely...
The problem is Patents, and licensing. If Red Hat wants to license, say, mp3 codec, it needs to pay royalties to Thomson to distribute. Is it likely that Red Hat are not going to pay for licenses for you, since they give you Fedora for free. Downloading the Realplayer RPMs and installing them is no more difficult than installing Realplayer on Windows. In fact, if you double click an RPM in GNOME, GNOME will ask for your root password automatically, and run system-install-packages. Real Networks have licensed the mp3 codec, so they are legally entitled to give them to you (as binaries) in Realplayer. Other codecs, like LAME, or FFMPEG are of questionable legallity (in the US at any rate), so you'll have to get them from unofficial sources. And if you follow http://www.fedorafaq.org/ there are EASY, STEP-BY-STEP instructions as to how to do this. "yum" is not hard to use!
It is also in the Fedora "Constitution" that they will only include software that does not impinge on any licensing or patented tech. This is for a very good reason - The GNU GPL has a clause that says if you include code that you are not legally entitled to (or are later banned from using by a court), then you forfeit the right to distribute the software, either in binaries or as source. Thus if Fedora included mp3 codecs in FC6, Thomson could take them to court, and if they were found in breach of the law, Fedora could no longer distribute FC6 or make any derivatives of it. If Fedora included RealPlayer RPMs in the distribution, they would be breaking their commitment to give you only GPL software, and would be unable to give you the source.
If you want a fully paid-up Linux distro, with licensed mp3 codecs and the rest, buy RHEL or SLED. If you want free($) and Free(OSS) software, then you have to live with the fact there are many people (IP holders in particular), that want to make sure you pay for your license to their technology. They won't be easy on you. Rhythmbox and Totem support things like OGG and FLAC out of the box. These are Free(OSS) technologies. You can use them without infringing any patents. MP3, WMA etc. are patented technologies - you need a license to use them, and no doubt the licenses preclude you from distributing them Free(OSS). Using unofficial, and possibly illegal (depending on your location) software is a choice YOU can take. It is not a choice Fedora can take - Red Hat (US company) would end up in court. Knowingly breaking the law can end Directors in jail, and wipe $millions out of their accounts.