Rahul Sundaram wrote:
Jesse Keating wrote:
On Tue, 11 Sep 2007 20:02:40 +0000 (UTC) Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler@chello.at wrote:
Rahul Sundaram <sundaram <at> fedoraproject.org> writes:
Thanks for this split. Hopefully we will able to link to the free part from within Fedora.
Unfortunately I don't think you will be able to. The stuff in the free part (or most of it, at least) is going to be exactly the stuff which Legal is most uncomfortable with: Free Software, but patent-encumbered in the US.
And really, if we could reference it, then why the crap couldn't we just package it in our repo?
There is a lot of differences between pointing to the repository and including the packages directly as I already explained in Fedora Advisory Board list so I won't rehash all the arguments again now. Please read the releated threads if you missed it. In short, it is not possible to include patent-encumbered packages directly in the repository as long as it hosted in US. Pointing to it might very well be possible.
Seriously though, this is just plain dumb wrong:
If we cannot include the packages in our own repositories but we can point to other repositories that do have the packages, nothing prevents us from distributing the appropriate /etc/yum.repos.d/ files in the fedora-release package.
So, I'll back up Jesse's question:
And really, if we could reference it, then why the crap couldn't we just package it in our repo?