Re: GNOME strongly supports open standards including OpenDocument Format

[Liam R E Quin <liam holoweb net>]

On Thu, 2005-12-15 at 18:27 +0100, Thomas Vander Stichele wrote:
[...]
> For example, people still feel that by default GNOME should ship with
> stuff that makes it easy to encode to mp3 or rip CD's for their hardware
> devices that do not support open formats; or that GNOME should play
> DVD's.

I think many people do feel that, and are upset at the software
patents and licensing situation that makes it difficult.

But such people can also be in support of Free software, and of
open standards -- it's another reason for people to wish that
ISO followed a royalty free patent policy. (Even the royalty free
patent policy we developed at W3C is far from perfect, although
it's the best compromise that a large number of very creative people
could come up with: our patent policy is not sufficient to ensure
the safety of GPL'd code once it's reused outside the original purpose.)

Let's make sure people don't blame Gnome for things outside the control
of the Gnome project, and let's make sure that we don't stop doing
what we feel to be right because of other people's confusion in this
area.

Instead, yes, go ahead and draft a statement about Free software, and
also a statement about why MP3 and DVD functionality cannot easily be
included in GPL'd software.

Best,

Liam


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Liam Quin, W3C XML Activity Lead, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin
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