>>> 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. > > Ronald is correct, it would violate the Free as in Freedom. However, > you should be taking this to the distributions rather than the GNOME > community itself. Distributors and perhaps user's themselves could > license it.
Is there a more appropriate forum for discussing a topic like this? Apologies if my previous email was inappropriate. I certainly do not want to encourage the GNOME community to violate any important ideals. Obviously one ideal that it wouldn't violate is giving our end-users the best desktop experience possible. It seems a bit hard to really do this without finding and supporting creative ways to allow popular desktop IP to integrate with the desktop. But "allowing" IP to integrate doesn't mean that the GNOME community needs to support it financially, obviously. I just found it interesting that Fluendo seemed agreeable to the idea that the GNOME community in general could work together to purchase a single license for all users. If there were enough interest to do something like this, it would make the GNOME user experience more exciting/modern, save money for everyone involved, and give access to the IP to all GNOME users. I just wanted to mention the idea and see if there might be interest. From the responses, it seems like there isn't much. But that is fine since end users can go to the Fluendo store to purchase the plugins directly if they want them. > I had a whole rant about proprietary stuff, but you guys have > probably heard it before. :-) While I certainly understand it would be bad for the GNOME community to support non-free projects at the expense of free projects, I didn't think I was suggesting anything that would detract from free software. If enough users/companies are willing to pony up the money to pay for a license, then this isn't taking away from money earmarked for other free projects. In fact, the Foundation could reasonably insist that some extra money to fund free projects would be required for them to consider supporting a non-free project. Also, it seems supporting popular IP multimedia codecs would likely make free software more popular rather than less. Since the license must be renewed each year, such an arrangement could be terminated in the future if people found the arrangement didn't work well. The unfortunate reality is that for a computer to be functional with multimedia, it is necessary for some intellectual property to integrate with the desktop. Fluendo is already doing this, so to a degree the need is being met. Really the opportunity to work more closely together only makes it more affordable for everyone. Brian _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
