Re: Intellectual Property Plugins and GNOME

[Thomas Vander Stichele <thomas apestaart org>]

On Wed, 2006-06-14 at 15:43 -0400, Ronald S. Bultje wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Jun 2006 15:26:59 -0500, Brian Cameron wrote:
> > Here at Sun, we have been talking with Fluendo about licensing these
> > plugins.  As you can imagine, it is fairly expensive to acquire a
> > license that allows a vendor to freely ship these plugins (as opposed
> > to a per-use license).
> [..]
> > Perhaps Microsoft and Fluendo would find it interesting to work a
> > license with the GNOME community
> 
> Such a license would violate any of the ideals that we stand for.

I agree with Ronald (though violate is overstating it :)) that this
should not be done by the GNOME foundation as such.  It would make sense
for a group of distributions to team up in some form to do this - but
the GNOME Foundation should be about Free Software.

(For those of you like me that didn't get Brian's original mail - he was
asking what people think about the possibility of some distributors
giving money to the GNOME foundation so that the GNOME foundation could
pay the license fees for proprietary codecs)

Thomas